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The Pioneer Health Centre, Peckham
The health centre which opened at Peckham in a working-class suburb of south-east London in 1935 was not a clinic which treated sick people but a 'family club'. For a subscription of one shilling a week, the entire family could enjoy such recreation as dancing, skating, gymnastics, billiards, and a range of other leisure activities. The innovative 3-storey glass and concrete building was designed around a central swimming pool which could be viewed from a self-service cafeteria. There was, in addition, a theatre, creche, and meeting rooms. The aim was to provide an environment in which health could be both cultivated and observed. Members were also entitled to contraceptive advice, ante-natal and post-natal care, infant welfare, sex education, and careers advice. Condition of membership was that families agreed to a periodic 'overhaul' within the centre's specially equipped laboratory.
This consisted of a medical examination for each family member followed by a 'family consultation' during which a general report was made. The Centre was seen by its founders as a 'social experiment' in which 'the living structure of society' and its health could be investigated and analysed. Health was perceived as being something more than mere absence of disease or individual well-being but was related to interaction with family and environment. It was believed that treatment of disease did not, of itself, restore a person to health or 'wholeness'. The centre also offered a health overhaul to non-members who wished to marry members as well as a 'premarital consultation'. There was a belief, not only at Peckham, that the 'vigour' of the nation depended on the health of its breeding population.
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