Oxford House

Arising out of the philanthropic and social movement of the mid-Victorian age which had found support at the University of Oxford and from the Tractarianism (or Oxford Movement) of the High Anglican Church, the settlement movement sprang up primarily from the work of the Barnetts (Samuel, rector of Whitechapel, and his wife Henrietta), whose pioneering view saw the first steps to establishing Toynbee Hall. This was considered by some at Oxford, led by the Warden of Keble College, Edward Talbot, "not sufficiently religious enough" and it was this group of Oxford men who looked to provide a more ascetic, denominationally religious, settlement in the East End of London. The first premises used…