Ministers seeking inspiration should talk to Pam about prewar 
Peckham

Our progressive past can offer a new idea of what the state is 
for, and how it can help neighbourhood organisations to thrive

Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday October 31, 2007
The Guardian

The one advantage of a period of political ferment, when Labour 
activists are beginning to wonder about the very purpose of 
their government, is that people at the top are suddenly open to 
ideas. When under pressure to deliver the vision thing - or, in 
language less windy and abstract, a sense of direction - there 
is an appetite for new thought. Ministers will doubtless be 
looking to lessons from abroad, especially the always accessible 
storehouse that is the US. But they might also do well to look 
behind - to one aspect of Britain's progressive past.

The other day I was in Peckham, in south London, visiting the 
site of a remarkable experiment. In a sparkling building of 
glass and light, two radical doctors in the 1930s established 
the Pioneer Health Centre. It was not a surgery, treating the 
sick, but rather a place dedicated to spreading - and studying - 
health. The founders, the husband and wife team of George Scott 
Williamson and Innes Pearse, reckoned health was a lot like 
disease, that it was contagious. The trick was to create an 
environment in which people would infect each other with wellbeing.

The result was a beautiful club, boasting an enormous swimming 
pool, a gym, boxing rings, a dance hall, a library, a creche 
with "room for perambulators" and a cafeteria serving "compost 
grown" - organic in today's language - food, produced at the 
centre's own farm a few miles away in Bromley. Local families 
could join for 6d a week, thereby ensuring they felt like 
members rather than recipients of charity. And they joined in 
their hundreds.

I was shown around by Pam Elven, who remembers her eyes lighting 
up when she first saw the place as a child, some seven decades 
ago. She watched others in the gym and felt compelled to join 
in. There was no compulsion or even much direction: people could 
just get on with what they fancied. She remembers the food too - 
home-baked bread that was brown and "a bit coarse" - and the 
lessons she was taught about "what food was good for you", 
lessons she passed on to her children and grandchildren.

Much of the data on the "Peckham experiment" was lost in the 
war, but all the signs pointed to great success. Experts noticed 
that babies born to Peckham mothers - those who had eaten the 
centre's organic fruit and vegetables - had a "bloom, sparkle 
and bounce" lacking before. Pam Elven is living evidence of the 
centre's success: I was struck by her robustness and vigour, 
testament to the healthy start she made in life.

And yet the Pioneer Health Centre closed in 1950, weeks before 
Pam was due to hold her wedding reception there. "It felt like 
news of a death," she says now. "We were like one massive 
family." The reason for the closure can be summed up in three 
letters: NHS. There was no room for an independent outfit, 
focusing on wellness rather than disease, in the new, 
centralised National Health Service. The Peckham building is 
today a block of luxury apartments.

Now, there's a narrow health lesson to be taken from the Peckham 
story. It says that both the uber-Blairite worship of choice and 
marketisation and the Brownite desire to get a grip through 
Hattie Jacques-style matrons submitting every ward to a "deep 
clean" both miss a vital point. They focus on disease and 
hospitals rather than on improving the environment in which 
people live. Williamson and Pearse understood 70 years ago that 
prevention was better than cure and that fitness, diet and 
social interaction were the key.

But Peckham is also a parable of a wider kind. The post-1945 
rush to build a universal welfare state trampled on too many 
small, creative hives of ingenuity. Before the Fabian 
infatuation with the central state, Britain had been host to a 
whole ecology of mutual societies, cooperatives, Sunday schools 
and workers' associations. Most went the way of Peckham, crushed 
under the giant heel of the Whitehall state.

One response to this is to set about rolling back the state, so 
that we might once again reveal Burke's "little platoons" of 
social activism, denied sunlight so long. David Cameron's 
self-described "big idea" of social responsibility argues as 
much, shrinking the state and letting "society" take the strain. 
He could - though he won't - look for some succour for this 
approach from Britain's own anarchistic or left-libertarian 
tradition, which remains largely forgotten.

But that would be to go too far in the other direction. It's 
easy to demonise the post-1945 shift towards the state, but 
there were good reasons for it. Reliance on charities and 
well-meaning individuals could never be a complete answer to the 
problems of health, education or poverty. For one thing, it was 
always too patchy: the Peckham experiment was great if you lived 
in Peckham, but not much use if you lived in Deptford or 
Doncaster. And it made your receipt of those essentials - a 
schooling or medical treatment - not only random but contingent 
on the kindness of strangers. The state ensured citizens got 
those services as of right.

That case for the state still holds true in the 21st century. 
So, perhaps the key aspect of the Peckham experiment is not 
which sector produced it - voluntary rather than public - but 
its scale. Geoff Mulgan, the former head of the Downing Street 
policy unit who now runs the Young Foundation in London's East 
End (and who has had a team of doctors, NHS managers and others 
examine the Peckham story), reckons we are too often hung up on 
public v private v voluntary. A large, national voluntary 
organisation can be just as faceless and bureaucratic in its 
operation as a state agency - and so, as every consumer knows, 
can private companies. Instead, says Mulgan, we need to find 
ways that encourage people to work together and cooperate for 
their own shared good: what he calls "collectivism in its micro 
form".

To this end there is much that government can do besides the 
Conservatives' preferred option of getting out of the way. A 
start would be giving greater muscle to locally elected 
officials and remedying the absurd situation in which our lowest 
tier of local government is currently 10 times larger than its 
equivalent on the continent or in the US. We need smaller, 
neighbourhood councils to reach people where they live. 
Classroom lessons in the social skills of communication and 
cooperation, of the kind warmly endorsed by Ed Balls last week, 
are welcome in this context, too.

Mulgan is also surely right to call for funds to be set aside 
for research and development in the public sphere, to match, 
say, the 1% or 2% of budget most large companies set aside for 
R&D. Doctors or patients could club together and apply for the 
money to do a latter-day Peckham experiment. There could be 
similar projects relating to crime or the environment. 
Successful schemes could be backed nationally and spread around.

It could add up to a renewed notion of what the state is for - 
first to guarantee universal rights and then to nurture and 
encourage the kind of human-scale cooperation that made Peckham 
such a phenomenon. Ministers are right to look around for 
inspiration, but they shouldn't ignore our collective past: they 
might be surprised, and delighted, by what they find there.

Jonathan Freedland presents Radio 4's The Long View on the 
Peckham Experiment on November 27

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2202177,00.html

see also www.thephf.org