The Open Centre was founded on the second of October 1977. Twenty five years on, we remain a ‘growth centre’ which offers a broad range of group and individual work within the humanistic psychology or human potential field.
The Open Centre is both a group of member practitioners and also a workspace that plays host to other guest practitioners who run related events in our premises. We attend to the spiritual but we are not a church or a cult. We attend to healing but we are not a clinic. We attend to the body but we are not a fitness centre. We work towards integrating the physical, emotional, thinking and spiritual realms.
The Open Centre arose as a result of the closure of Quaesitor and Community, the two major growth centres that preceded it in London. Kate Wylie and Peter Payne gathered together a group of humanistically oriented practitioners to form Britain’s first major growth centre run by the practitioners who worked in it. Kate has said of the idea of the Open Centre: “From the first moment I realised the Open Centre was feasible I had a special feeling about the simplicity and naturalness of the idea ... it seemed so obvious – a leaderless group with a function. A way for us to practise what we preach. A working situation where we would have to keep in touch because we ran it together and depended on it for our livelihood.” This was the spirit in which the Open Centre was formed – a spirit which endures, 25 years on.
The Open Centre has been located in the same conveniently central premises at 188 Old Street, London EC1 throughout its 25 year history. We rent three spacious rooms on the third floor which provide a near ideal environment for our activities, with open space for movement and freedom for people to express their noisier selves too. There have been times when it seemed likely that we would have to move elsewhere but our future here now seems to be reasonably assured.
Although the area is newly fashionable, when the Open Centre was founded this part of London was still very much a fringe district with an appropriately rich history of fostering ‘alternative’ creative and social developments. The Elizabethan theatre developed in this area (outside the City walls as it was then) and many of Shakespeare’s early plays were written and first performed nearby. The building in which we work was built as a ‘greycoat’ charity school providing education for children of the poor. Immediately opposite us there once stood St Luke’s Lunatic Asylum, which pioneered humane alternatives to ‘Bedlam’. Behind us lies Bunhill Fields, the non-conformist burial ground where William Blake and John Bunyan were laid to rest. This area was also once a hotbed of Methodism. Of late it has been a hotbed of modern art and ecological activism.
The notion of variety in one place is central to the Open Centre. We believe that everyone has the potential to grow, but that no particular approach necessarily provides ‘the answer’. We therefore offer people a range of different ways of approaching their self-exploration under one roof. This also has the advantage of allowing our clients to combine different but compatible methods whilst minimising the risk of disparate and split-off work.
Currently there are six of us working in Bioenergetics, Deep Bodywork, the Feldenkrais Method, Psychodrama, Postural Integration, Primal Integration, Pulsing, and Transactional Analysis.
In addition to the current practitioners, there have been over 25 other member practitioners over the years offering a range of other disciplines including massage, Gestalt, Psychosynthesis, Tai-do, Encounter, Polarity Therapy and dance. Moreover, numerous other practitioners offering compatible or allied activities such as yoga, theatre rehearsals or spiritual teachings have rented our rooms over the years, adding to the on-site variety.
Most of the present members have been at the centre for over fifteen years and in some cases over twenty! Each member practitioner at the Open Centre organises their own practice and finances individually, whilst sharing the costs and administration of the Centre. Each member is also directly involved in the physical and administrative running of the centre and has specific tasks.
We try to keep the fees for our activities reasonable in the interest of attracting a broad cross section of the community including those who might not otherwise be able to participate. In order to maintain our independence we are entirely self-funded. We have never applied for charitable status as an organisation because of the divorce of power and responsibility to trustees that this would entail.
Most people come to us either through word of mouth recommendations or via our programme. We welcome referrals but do not have any formal links with other agencies. We do not operate from a medical model and are not an extension of the psychiatric services. Although the spur to begin working on one’s growth is often a crisis, most of the work in the centre happens when people are not in crisis.
We do not operate a central system for allocating potential clients to particular practitioners. In line with our human potential philosophy, we leave the responsibility for choosing what is the best approach firmly with the potential client. However, we are mindful that the variety available may seem bewildering to newcomers and therefore we provide a variety of means, including introductory events, written literature and personal interviews, to enable such choices to be as informed as possible.
Although we all offer individual work, group work has been a hallmark of the Open Centre from the outset. Moreover open group work available to members of the general public has been a notably enduring feature.
Whether through group work or one to one, the essence of the Open Centre is a place for ‘opening’: for opening to one’s centre and learning to live from one’s centre. The Open Centre is a ‘growth centre’.
Juliana Brown, Scott Clark, Guy Gladstone, Richard Mowbray, Eric Whitton, Silke Ziehl
© Juliana Brown, Scott Clark, Guy Gladstone, Richard Mowbray, Eric Whitton, Silke Ziehl 2002
Open Centre home | Who we are & what we do | Introductions
Individual work | Weekly ongoing groups | Weekend groups | Intensives | Residentials
Training | For practitioners | Feature articles | Publications | Premises | Location
Booking | Contacting us
'The Open Centre' is registered as a service mark.