South London's finest: a hundred years of The Peckham Experiment
by Guy Ware
Guy Ware's novel, The Peckham Experiment, was set in 2017. Here he explains how he came to write a new story bringing the life and scabrous views of its narrator bang up to date.
IIn 1926, the Peckham Experiment set out to prove that it was possible to improve the health of the working classes by giving them access to self-organized exercise, social events and education, backed up by regular health checks and advice. By 1935 it moved to a purpose-built home – a modernist palace of glass and steel, complete with its own swimming pool, gymnasium, dance hall, billiard rooms, café, sports and play facilities. It was a huge success – exceedingly popular with its local member families, and with academics and public policy professionals, who visited from all over the world to learn its lessons. Temporarily closed during the Second World War, it re-opened in 1945, thanks to an energetic members' lobbying campaign directed at the new Labour Government. But it closed for good only five years later, its ethos of prevention rather than cure, of promoting overall well-being rather than treating individual complaints – but also of charging membership fees – having put it at odds with the newly-established NHS.
After that the building languished – used for Adult Education and Council offices, but gradually falling into disuse and disrepair – until, in the 1990s, it was sold for development into private flats.
In my novel, one of the first residents of those flats is Charlie Jellicoe, himself a former property developer – but also a former Communist, and a gay anti-fascist with a taste for expensive booze and fine tailoring. Also, as a child, an enthusiastic participant in the Peckham Experiment. Now 85, Charlie is taking stock. It is the night before his brother JJ's funeral. Which is also, coincidentally, the night before the June 2017 General Election, and – not coincidentally – a week before the Grenfell Tower fire killed 72 people and brutally exposed so much that has gone wrong – that we have allowed to go wrong – with our public services. Over one increasingly drunken night, he tells the story of how, together with JJ, who managed the kind of Council housing Charlie built, he has committed his life to the rise, and, with increasing despair, witnessed the fall of that broader social experiment: the British Welfare State.
Riddled with biases and contradictions of its own, the original Peckham Experiment nonetheless offers for many a different way of thinking about welfare. The Peckham Experiment CIC exists to preserve, share and explore its legacy and heritage. For this centenary year they invited me to write a new story about the experiment. Flattered, I agreed, and then wished I hadn't, and hoped they might forget. I didn't think there was a story there. And then, one day rummaging around the Tate, I discovered the Unprofessional Painting exhibition of 1938.
During the 1930s the British Surrealist Julian Trevelyan was an active member of the Artists International Association, founded to combat the rise of fascism – with about as much success, as Peter Cook might have said, as all the satirical Weimar cabaret had in stopping Hitler. In 1938, though, Trevelyan organized an exhibition of 'Unprofessional Painting' – mostly the work of the 'Pitmen Painters': Northumbrian coal miners whose after-hours art club had proved surprisingly popular. After a successful show in Gateshead, Trevelyan brought the show to south London, and displayed it at the Pioneer Centre, home to the Peckham Experiment, where Charlie Jellicoe and his family would undoubtedly have seen it. What would they make of it?
Trevelyan had given me the spark I needed. I'm afraid I repaid the favour by stealing the title of one of his own works: 'Rubbish May Be Shot Here, 1937'.
Charlie would have been seven. Egged on by his spivvy Uncle Tony, he is inspired to insert a radical republican picture of his own: the first of his many experiments in fraud and self-invention. At least, that's the way he remembers it now. Having him tell the story to his long-suffering niece Diana gives me the chance to report on Charlie's declining health and increasingly dyspeptic views of progress in our politics and the state of the world since 2017. It's fair to say he isn't a fan.
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You can read Rubbish May Be Shot Here, 1937 here. The Peckham Experiment is available here. Guy Ware's new collection of stories, A Day Like Any Other, will be published in June, discover now.
Guy Ware is the author of five novels, all published by Salt, including The Peckham Experiment and, most recently, Our Island Story. Guy lives with his family in south London. His new collection of stories, A Day Like Any Other, will be published in June 2026.
