History

Caius is pronounced ‘keys’

 

Caius House is a charity and youth club which has been serving the community of Battersea for over a century.

In 1887 some undergraduates and fellows from Gonville and Caius College Cambridge rented a house in Battersea and started a College “settlement” where former undergraduates from the College lived and ran a range of clubs for local residents.

Shortly afterward, they started a very successful boys club (and later a girls club) and found that it attracted members from the poorest and least educated young people in the area.

   

In 1896 Edward Wilson, a Gonville and Caius College graduate, came to London as a medical student to be a “settler” at Caius House and to help with the youth club. Edward Wilson was later to be the doctor on Captain Scott’s expedition to the South Pole and to die with him in 1912 on the return journey.

The Caius House youth club building (located on Holman Road) had served the local community well for a century but was badly in need of renovation; however the layout was thought to be totally unsuitable for a modern youth centre and so the Trustees decided to sell the plot of land (in conjunction with a neighbouring plot of land belonging to Wandsworth Borough Council) to a developer who would build residential accommodation with space for a modern youth centre on the first two floors.

   

After consultation with youth members and the community an initiative was agreed whereby the derelict old building was demolished and the process of re-building a modern state of the art youth centre began. Construction started in March 2012 and the new Caius House building opened its doors in September 2014 in Holman Road, back in the heart of the community. After seven years in temporary premises in Petworth Road, young people and the community were welcomed to a 'Homecoming' event.

 

Our new building allows us to go beyond conventional youth centre activities.  While our targeted media, music and sports provision continues to be extremely popular now Caius can play a much larger role bringing the community together and bridging the education and life skills gap between childhood and adulthood.