IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/comdev/v56y2025i3p444-453.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The origins of community development practice in Great Britain

Author

Listed:
  • Charlie McConnell

Abstract

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).

Suggested Citation

  • Charlie McConnell, 2025. "The origins of community development practice in Great Britain," Community Development, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 56(3), pages 444-453, May.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:comdev:v:56:y:2025:i:3:p:444-453
    DOI: 10.1080/15575330.2025.2481377
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/15575330.2025.2481377
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/15575330.2025.2481377?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:comdev:v:56:y:2025:i:3:p:444-453. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RCOD20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.