The Conway Hall Ethical Society, formerly the South Place Ethical Society, based in London at
Conway Hall, is thought to be the oldest surviving
freethought
Freethought (sometimes spelled free thought) is an unorthodox attitude or belief.
A freethinker holds that beliefs should not be formed on the basis of authority, tradition, revelation, or dogma, and should instead be reached by other meth ...
organisation in the world and is the only remaining
ethical society in the United Kingdom. It now advocates
secular humanism
Secular humanism is a philosophy, belief system, or life stance that embraces human reason, logic, secular ethics, and philosophical naturalism, while specifically rejecting religious dogma, supernaturalism, and superstition as the basi ...
and is a member of
Humanists International
Humanists International (known as the International Humanist and Ethical Union, or IHEU, from 1952–2019) is an international non-governmental organisation championing secularism and human rights, motivated by secular humanist values. Fou ...
.
History
The Society's origins trace back to 1787, as a
nonconformist congregation, led by
Elhanan Winchester, rebelling against the doctrine of
eternal damnation. The congregation, known as the
Philadelphians or
Universalists, secured their first home at Parliament Court Chapel on the eastern edge of London on 14 February 1793.
William Johnson Fox became minister of the congregation in 1817. By 1821 Fox's congregation had decided to build a new place of worship, and issued a call for "subscriptions for a new Unitarian chapel, South Place, Finsbury".
File:South Place Chapel postcard.jpg, Postcard of South Place Chapel
File:Front of Interior of South Place chapel.jpg, Front of interior of South Place Chapel.
File:Rear of interior of South Place Chapel.jpg, Rear of interior of South Place Chapel.
File:South Place Plaque.png, Commemorative plaque describing the South Place Chapel.
Subscribers (donors) included businessman and patron of the arts
Elhanan Bicknell. In 1824 the congregation built a chapel at South Place, in the
Finsbury
Finsbury is a district of Central London, forming the southeastern part of the London Borough of Islington. It borders the City of London.
The Manorialism, Manor of Finsbury is first recorded as ''Vinisbir'' (1231) and means "manor of a man c ...
district of
central London
Central London is the innermost part of London, in England, spanning the City of London and several boroughs. Over time, a number of definitions have been used to define the scope of Central London for statistics, urban planning and local gove ...
.
The chapel was repaired by
John Wallen, of a family of London architects and builders. This chapel later became the home of South Place Ethical Society. The chapel stood on the site of what is now the office building known as 8 Finsbury Circus; the building has an entrance in South Place which bears a plaque commemorating the chapel.
In 1929 they built new premises,
Conway Hall, at 37 (now numbered 25)
Red Lion Square
Red Lion Square is a small square in Holborn, London. The square was laid out in 1684 by Nicholas Barbon, taking its name from the Red Lion Inn. According to some sources, the bodies of three regicides—Oliver Cromwell, John Bradshaw and H ...
, in nearby
Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury is a district in the West End of London, part of the London Borough of Camden in England. It is considered a fashionable residential area, and is the location of numerous cultural institution, cultural, intellectual, and educational ...
, on the site of a tenement, previously a factory belonging to James Perry, a pen and ink maker. Conway Hall is named after an American,
Moncure D. Conway, who led the Society from 1864 to 1885 and from 1892 to 1897, during which time it moved further away from
Unitarianism
Unitarianism () is a Nontrinitarianism, nontrinitarian sect of Christianity. Unitarian Christians affirm the wikt:unitary, unitary God in Christianity, nature of God as the singular and unique Creator deity, creator of the universe, believe that ...
. Conway spent the break in his tenure in the United States, writing a biography of
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine (born Thomas Pain; – In the contemporary record as noted by Conway, Paine's birth date is given as January 29, 1736–37. Common practice was to use a dash or a slash to separate the old-style year from the new-style year. In ...
. In 1888 the name of the Society was changed from South Place Religious Society to South Place Ethical Society (SPES) under
Stanton Coit's leadership. In 1950 the SPES joined the
Ethical Union
Humanists UK, known from 1967 until May 2017 as the British Humanist Association (BHA), is a charitable organisation which promotes secular humanism and aims to represent non-religious people in the UK through a mixture of charitable service ...
. In 1969 another name change was mooted, to The South Place Humanist Society, a discussion that sociologist Colin Campbell suggests symbolized the death of the ethical movement in England.
[Colin Campbell. 1971. ''Towards a Sociology of Irreligion''. London: MacMillan Press.]
The original name, South Place Ethical Society, was retained until 2012, when it changed to Conway Hall Ethical Society. In November 2013 Elizabeth Lutgendorff was elected Chair of the Conway Hall General Committee, becoming the youngest Chair in the society's history. On 1 August 2014 the society became a
Charitable Incorporated Organisation
A charitable incorporated organisation (CIO) is a Incorporation (business), corporate form of business designed for (and only available to) Charitable organization, charitable organisations in England and Wales. A similar form, with minor differe ...
with a new charitable object: "The advancement of study, research and education in humanist ethical principles". This replaced the previous object: "The study and dissemination of ethical principles and the cultivation of a rational religious sentiment."
Humanist ceremonies
In 1935 twenty members of the Society signed a document stating that Conway Hall was their regular
place of worship
A place of worship is a specially designed structure or space where individuals or a group of people such as a congregation come to perform acts of devotion, veneration, or religious study. A building constructed or used for this purpose is s ...
. It was therefore certified for marriages by the
Registrar-General until 1977 when the Deputy Registrar-General ruled that the Hall could not be used for weddings under the terms of the
Places of Worship Registration Act. This followed the report in the winter of 1975 of a marriage solemnised at Conway Hall. He was probably influenced by the 1970 ruling of
Lord Denning
Alfred Thompson Denning, Baron Denning, (23 January 1899 – 5 March 1999), was an English barrister and judge. He was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 1923 and became a King's Counsel in 1938. Denning became a judge in 1944 when he w ...
, that marriages could only be solemnised in places whose principal use is for the "worship of God or
o doreverence to a deity.
Until the ruling the Society had an established tradition of performing secular funerals, memorial ceremonies and
namings of children at Conway Hall.
Sunday Concerts
The Sunday Concerts at Conway Hall can be traced back to 1878 when the Peoples Concert Society was formed for the purpose of "increasing the popularity of good music by means of cheap concerts". Many of these concerts were held at the South Place Institute, but in 1887 the Peoples Concert Society had to cut short its season through lack of funds. At that point the South Place Ethical Society undertook the task of organising concerts under the first Honorary Secretary
Alfred J. Clements and Assistant Secretary George Hutchinson who continued to run them under the name 'South Place Sunday Concerts'. The thousandth concert was played on 20 February 1927, and the two-thousandth concert was held at the
Queen Elizabeth Hall
The Queen Elizabeth Hall (QEH) is a music venue on the South Bank in London, England, that hosts European classical music, classical, jazz, and avant-garde music, talks and dance performances. It was opened in 1967, with a concert conducted by ...
on 9 March 1969. Clements was the Honorary Secretary for over 50 years, from 1887 to 1938. The
Clements Memorial Prize for chamber music was set up in his name in 1938. Composer
Richard Henry Walthew also had a long association with the Sunday Concerts, from the early 1900s until his death in 1951.
The concert series provided a rare platform for the work of women composers during its first few decades. The programming included a still small, but significant number of compositions by women compared to other concerts in London. Women composers featured in the first 1,000 concerts included
Alice Verne-Bredt, sisters
Amy, Annie and Jessie Grimson,
Liza Lehmann,
Ethel Smyth,
Edith Swepstone,
Josephine Troup and
Maude Valérie White.
Hawkins Catalogue
Frank A. Hawkins served as Treasurer of the Sunday Concerts for 24 years from 1905 until his death in June 1929. He collected nearly 2,000 pieces of sheet music of principally classical and romantic chamber music, which were bequeathed to the Society. The collection has been catalogued by composer and instrument combination and is held on the Conway Hall premises.
Conway Memorial Lecture
The Conway Memorial Lecture was inaugurated by the Society in 1910 to honour Moncure Conway who died in 1907. The decision to create the Lecture was made in 1908 and the first Lecture, ''The Task of Rationalism'', was given by John Russell and is presumed to have been chaired by Edward Clodd.
Prominent lecturers have included
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and public intellectual. He had influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, and various areas of analytic ...
,
Lancelot Hogben
Lancelot Thomas Hogben FRS FRSE (9 December 1895 – 22 August 1975) was a British experimental zoologist and medical statistician. He developed the African clawed frog ''(Xenopus laevis)'' as a model organism for biological research in his e ...
,
Stanton Coit,
Joseph Needham
Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham (; 9 December 1900 – 24 March 1995) was a British biochemist, historian of science and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science and technology, initia ...
,
Edward John Thompson (1942),
Jacob Bronowski
Jacob Bronowski (18 January 1908 – 22 August 1974) was a Polish-British mathematician and philosopher. He is best known for developing a humanistic approach to science, and as the presenter and writer of the thirteen-part 1973 BBC television ...
,
Fred Hoyle
Sir Fred Hoyle (24 June 1915 – 20 August 2001) was an English astronomer who formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and was one of the authors of the influential B2FH paper, B2FH paper. He also held controversial stances on oth ...
,
Edmund Leach,
Margaret Knight,
Christopher Hill (1989),
Gilbert Murray (1915),
Hermann Bondi
Sir Hermann Bondi (1 November 1919 – 10 September 2005) was an Austrian-British people, British mathematician and physical cosmology, cosmologist.
He is best known for developing the steady state model of the universe with Fred Hoyle and Thom ...
(1992),
Harold Blackham,
Laurens van der Post,
Alex Comfort (1990),
Fenner Brockway
Archibald Fenner Brockway, Baron Brockway (1 November 1888 – 28 April 1988) was a British socialist politician, humanist campaigner and anti-war activist.
Early life and career
Brockway was born to Rev. William George Brockway and Frances Eliz ...
,
Jonathan Miller
Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller CBE (21 July 1934 – 27 November 2019) was an English theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, comedian and physician. After training in medicine and specialising in neurology in the late 19 ...
,
David Starkey
Dr. David Robert Starkey (born 3 January 1945) is a British historian, radio and television presenter, with views that he describes as conservative. The only child of Quaker parents, he attended Kirkbie Kendal School, Kendal Grammar School b ...
,
Bernard Crick,
AC Grayling and
Roger Penrose
Sir Roger Penrose (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematician, mathematical physicist, Philosophy of science, philosopher of science and Nobel Prize in Physics, Nobel Laureate in Physics. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics i ...
. No Lectures took place in 1958-1959 and between 1961-1966.
The 2014 Conway Memorial Lecture was given by Professor
Lisa Jardine on 26 June 2014. It was titled "Things I Never Knew About My Father" and detailed the
MI5
MI5 ( Military Intelligence, Section 5), officially the Security Service, is the United Kingdom's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Gov ...
files kept on her father, Jacob Bronowski, who sixty years earlier had delivered that year's Conway Memorial Lecture.
Prominent members (past and present)
*
A. E. Heath
*
Annie Besant
Annie Besant (; Wood; 1 October 1847 – 20 September 1933) was an English socialist, Theosophy (Blavatskian), theosophist, freemason, women's rights and Home Rule activist, educationist and campaigner for Indian nationalism. She was an arden ...
*
Harold Blackham
*
Fenner Brockway
Archibald Fenner Brockway, Baron Brockway (1 November 1888 – 28 April 1988) was a British socialist politician, humanist campaigner and anti-war activist.
Early life and career
Brockway was born to Rev. William George Brockway and Frances Eliz ...
*
C. Delisle Burns
*
Herbert Burrows
*
Peter Cadogan
*
Alfred J. Clements
*
Stanton Coit
*
Moncure Conway
*
Andrew Copson
*
Naomi Lewis
*
Samuel Kerkham Ratcliffe, regular lecturer 1910s–1930s
*
J. M. Robertson
*
Donald Rooum
*
John Saunders
*
Athene Seyler
*
Barbara Smoker
*
Harry Snell
*
Reginald Sorensen
*
Dr Harry Stopes-Roe
*
Nicolas Walter
*
Richard Henry Walthew
*
Elhanan Winchester
Other notable people associated with the Society
*
Charles Bradlaugh
Charles Bradlaugh (; 26 September 1833 – 30 January 1891) was an English political activist and atheist. He founded the National Secular Society in 1866, 15 years after George Holyoake had coined the term "secularism" in 1851.
In 1880, Br ...
, founder of the National Secular Society, and his daughter
Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner
*
Sophia Dobson Collet, who contributed hymns; her brothers Charles, the Society's musical director, and
Collet Dobson Collet
*
Eliza Flower and her sister
Sarah Fuller Flower Adams, who contributed hymns
*
Peter Fribbins, C20 director of Sunday concerts formerly held at Conway Hall
*
Philip Harwood, assistant minister to Fox in 1841
*
Gerald Heard, lecturer from 1927
*
James Hemming, in whose name the Society administers an annual prize since 2009
*
Laurence Housman, C20 pacifist and socialist
*
Harriet Law, C19 freethinker
*
Harry Price, C20 psychic researcher, born on the site
*
John Pye-Smith, C19 theologian, tutor to Fox
*
Rosemary Rapaport, who launched what would become the
Purcell School at the Hall in 1962
*
Archibald Robertson, popular lecturer 1945–60
*
Samuel Sharpe, who joined South Place Chapel in 1821
*
Timothy West, C20 actor
*
Anna Wheeler, 1820s speaker on women's rights
Journal

The journal of the society, which records its proceedings, is the ''Ethical Record''. The issue shown for December 2012 was volume 117, number 11. This edition outlines the procedure that took place for the historic change of name the previous month.
Sunday Assembly
From 2014, Conway Hall was host to the
Sunday Assembly, a popular secular service which took place on the first and third Sunday of every month until it moved to
Bethnal Green
Bethnal Green is an area in London, England, and is located in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It is in east London and part of the East End of London, East End. The area emerged from the small settlement which developed around the common la ...
in 2024.
See also
*
Humanists UK
Humanists UK, known from 1967 until May 2017 as the British Humanist Association (BHA), is a charitable organisation which promotes secular humanism and aims to represent Irreligion in the United Kingdom, non-religious people in the UK throug ...
*
Ethical Movement
*
International Humanist and Ethical Union
*
National Secular Society
The National Secular Society (NSS) is a British campaigning organisation that promotes secularism and the separation of church and state. It holds that no one should gain advantage or disadvantage because of their religion or lack of it. The Soc ...
*
Rationalist Association
The Rationalist Association was a charity in the United Kingdom which published '' New Humanist'' magazine between 1885 and 2025. Since 2025, the Rationalist Press has been the publishing imprint of Humanists UK.
The original Rationalist Press ...
References
Sources
*
* Conway, Moncure Daniel. ''Centenary History of the South Place Society: based on four discourses given in the chapel in May and June, 1893''. London/Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1894
* MacKillop, Ian (1986). ''The British Ethical Societies''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
External links
Conway Hall Ethical SocietyThe Ethical Record OnlineConway Memorial Lectureswith texts
*
{{Authority control
Humanist associations
Ethical movement
Freethought organizations
Organizations established in 1793
Secular humanism
Charities based in London
Skeptic organisations in the United Kingdom
Clubs and societies in London
Non-profit organisations based in London