The origins of community development practice in Great Britain

This article traces the roots within Great Britain of community development practice. Despite differences in the Scottish, English, and Welsh experiences, social and community movements have shared commonalities, especially following Great Britain’s emergence as the world’s first industrial and rapidly urbanizing country. The first part of the paper covers a three-hundred-year period from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century. The second part of the paper covers the period after 1945, when for the first time the Labour Party secured a parliamentary majority, leading to transformative change across the three countries. And, from when government first started to experiment with supporting community development type programs and employing community development practitioners in the British colonies and within Britain. I shall end in the late 1960s, after which community development emerged as a profession. I have written another paper on the Making, Breaking, and Rebuilding of the community development profession in Great Britain (McConnell. 2026).