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The settlement movement started in London. Victorian England, increasingly concerned with urban poverty, gave rise to a movement whereby those connected to universities settled students in slum areas to live and work alongside local people. Through their efforts settlement houses were established for education, savings, sports, and arts. Such institutions were often praised by religious representatives concerned with the lives of the poor, and criticized as normative or moralistic by radical social movements.

The British Association of Settlements and Social Action Centres (BASSAC) is a network of such organizations in the United Kingdom. Birmingham University has produced a brief history of the settlement movement in the UK. Examples of the earliest settlements dating back to 1884 are Aston-Mansfield, Toynbee Hall, and Oxford House. There is also a global network, the International Federation of Settlements.

The movement gave rise to many social policy initiatives and innovative ways of working to improve the conditions of the most excluded members of society. The Poor Man's Lawyer service came about because a barrister volunteered his time and encouraged his friends to do the same.

In the United States, the two largest and most influential settlement houses were Chicago's Hull House (founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889) and the Henry Street Settlement in New York (founded by Lillian Wald in 1893). University Settlement House, the oldest in the United States, was, like Hull House and the Henry Street Settlement, also an important locus for Progressive Era reform. United Neighborhood Houses of New York is the federation of 35 settlement houses in New York City. The concept was continued by Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker hospitality houses in the 1930s.

The movement also spread to late Tsarist Russia, as Stanislav Shatsky and Alexander Zelenko set up a network of educational and social institutions in northern Moscow in 1905, naming it "Setlment" (the transliterated English word in Russian). This network of institutions was closed down by the Tsarist authorities in 1908.

Today, settlements are still community-focused organizations, providing a range of services in generally underserved urban areas, though they are staffed by professional employees rather than students, and no longer require that employees live alongside those they serve.

• East Side House Settlement
• Henry Street Settlement
• Hudson Guild
• Oakland House settlement
• Oxford House
• Stanton Street Settlement
• Toynbee Hall
• University Settlement House
• Lenox Hill Neighborhood House
• Hamilton-Madison House

• Hull House

• Blank, Barbara Trainin, "Settlement Houses: Old Idea in New Form Builds Communities", The New Social Worker, Summer 1998, Vol. 5, No. 3

• British Association of Settlements and Social Action Centres (BASSAC) website
• International Federation of Settlements website
• Toynbee Hall website
• Lenox Hill Neighborhood House website
• Aston-Mansfield website
• Oxford House website
• United Neighborhood Houses of New York website
• United South End Settlements (Boston, Massachusetts)
• House of Seven Gables Settlement House (Salem, Massachusetts)
• University Settlement Society of New York website
• Hamilton-Madison House online