The photographs below show the interiors of the Cheltenham Ladies’ College mission settlement on Old Nichol Street, not long after it was opened, in 1898. Many public schools and some Oxbridge colleges were opening mission houses in poor areas of London, and after a false start further east in Bethnal Green, Cheltenham Ladies’ College arrived in the Old Nichol – or rather, they turned up just as the last of the slum had come down, and the Boundary Street Estate was nearing completion.

Today the four-storey building, on the south side of Old Nichol Street, facing St Hilda’s East Community Centre, is private housing, and these interiors are long gone. (St Hilda’s East is the mission’s direct descendant.)

The block was designed, free of charge, by architect Philip Day, whose wife was an old Cheltonian. One of the first visitors was a reporter for the Ladies’ Field magazine, who noted its “cosy corners, which are so enchanting a feature of the lovely drawing room (it might be a country house drawing room instead of one in East London), which were designed by the Society of Artists, 53 New Bond Street.” Miss Virtue-Tebb had supplied the Italian photographs for decoration; Miss Snodgrass had baked the shortbread.

Very, very High Church, the mission house included an oratory, for prayers, with prie-dieux, and frescoes of scenes from the Bible. One early volunteer remembered: “How easy it was made for us – the beautiful, inspiring prayers in the Oratory, the quiet library with its well-chosen books, the orderliness of the house, the cheery social life and all the old residents so willing to help a newcomer.”

There were a huge number of activities run for the locals by the mission, including Mothers’ Meetings; nursing and infirmary visits; the Factory Girls’ Dinner club; classes in singing, drawing, painting, literature; dressmaking and elocution; there was a Holiday Fund; a Society for Helping Young Servants. There were Baby Consultations weekly, with a woman doctor; the Invalid Children’s Aid Association; the Married Girls’ Club; Bible Class; the Daffodil Club “for Jewish girls”; from 1914, the Soldiers’ Wives’ Club; a Saturday Club for “crippled” boys to learn woodcarving; later on, a subsidised bookshop for local Board School-leavers; the Skilled Employment Committee, and lectures by the Women’s Industrial Council.

This was “businesslike otherworldliness”, as one observer put it, and young women students often quickly found themselves with a lot of responsibility (and power); one was made manager of a large school in Bethnal Green Road at the age of 23.

What had started out as traditional charitable work for women soon took on a more “social scientific” tone, and in 1903 the School of Sociology and Social Economics was founded, which was in 1912 incorporated into the London School of Economics. The Cheltenham Ladies’ College mission workers figure large in the SSSE’s graduates. In the same way that many young men at male mission houses had found, the women discovered that charitable work and investigating poverty brought a sense of freedom – a liberation from others’ expectations of them, plus a new sense of direction in life.