The history of the West London Mission

According to Hugh Price Hughes, Jesus came to the world not just to save individuals, but to save society as well. The West London Mission was his initiative, and was founded in 1887 to put that principle into practice.

The original meeting place was St James Hall in Piccadilly. The Mission grew out of the Forward Movement, which maintained that Methodism had lost its original emphasis on social change, focusing too much on personal faith. So worship and social action went together here from the start.

One striking and essential part of the work for many years was the Sisters of the People. Well-off women, from various denominations, came together to form an inner-city community, wore a uniform and devoted their lives to helping Londoners in need and sharing the gospel.

By 1914, the services provided by the West London Mission sound to our ears well ahead of their time. They included a crèche for working mothers, a job centre, a labour yard, medical dispensaries, surgeries and health visitors, youth clubs, a convalescent home, a free legal advice service, and a hospice for the dying. The church also encouraged trade unions and the labour movement.

UsersgillisDesktophsop Open air preaching was another feature of the mission from the start. Most famously, the superintendent Donald Soper preached at 3pm every Sunday of the year at Tower Hill from 1927 and then at Hyde Park from 1942 (a witness that continued until his death in 1998). It was also in 1927 that Soper started what became the Order of Christian Witness, training and sending preachers out throughout south-east England.

In the interwar period, the development of state welfare took over some of the West London Mission’s work. The church diverted its efforts into new projects, including a hostel to save women from sex work, taking in 8,500 women and girls in 15 years. It started a maternity hospital treating women with sexually transmitted diseases, and a hostel for men discharged from prison. The church was also involved in the Hungerford Club, providing baths, bed, food and medical care for homeless people.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the church started two homes for unmarried mothers, another for people on probation, two for the elderly, and a hostel for alcoholics.

After a roof collapsed in 1975 at Kingsway Hall - then one of the two large meeting houses of the West London Mission - it was decided to sell the building and merge the two congregations and their work. The sale raised £2.5m to fund the work.

While the social work of the mission has always been small in scale, it has repeatedly served to point out needs and set an example in how to meet them, an example that has been taken up by others.

In recent decades, the Mission has set all its work on a professional footing, employing professional staff and managers and adhering to secular social work regulations. Since 2000, the SPA programme (Spirituality in Action) has allowed volunteers to get involved with the work again, reinforcing the Christian presence in the Mission's social care services.

The work we do and the way we do it have both changed completely since 1887, but the point of it is exactly the same: to make a difference in the lives of people, wherever it is most needed.