‘The Doctor’, as John Stansfeld was universally known, was ever ready to welcome Alec back to Bermondsey. They got on. They shared a vision, a vision which Stansfeld began to realise in 1897 when he set up a small medical mission near London Bridge. His Bermondsey venture would soon grow from a one-man endeavour into a university ‘settlement’ in all but name, one of the earliest in London and the only one south of the river. Of the others the most notable were Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel, Oxford House in Bethnal Green, and the Passmore Edwards Settlement in Bloomsbury.

The settlement movement was the same age as Alec himself. Founded in January 1884 and opened before the following Christmas, Toynbee Hall was named after Arnold Toynbee, who had died prematurely the previous year at the age of thirty-one. It had the distinction of being the earliest of the university settlements. It was also the grandest. Established on a non-denominational basis by the Revd Samuel Barnett – ‘in religious faith an idealistic Christian without dogma … in social faith a Christian Socialist’ – it was to be a place where richer students of diverse creeds and different political persuasions could live alongside, befriend, and contribute to the welfare of much poorer people. But it was to be more. Industrialism, and the growth of great cities that accompanied it, had riven society in twain. Toynbee Hall, it was hoped, might ‘do something to weld classes into society’. In this it singularly failed. It appealed to Ruskinian aesthetes rather than Franciscan ascetics.