A variety of work camp movements flourished in Europe during the inter-war years. This paper explores the way in which some of these movements developed a theory of the work camp as a means of countering the socialising influences of city life. This requires us to see the work camp as a pedagogic space, which was designed to promote particular educational outcomes, using particular techniques and methods that focused on bodily change as well as cognitive developments.

To explore these educational dimensions, the paper concentrates on two case study movements in Britain in the 1930s. In both cases, it explores the international European connections of these movements. It argues that while the pedagogic dimensions of the British movements were under-theorised by comparison with Germany, it is nevertheless possible to identify underlying values and purposes, as well as shared methods of 'instructing' bodies and minds. Core to these was the idea of the work camp as an educating antidote to the malignant influences of city life. The spatial dimension was particularly significant; these were bounded but liminal communities of instruction, whose location was invariably rural, and whose primary means of instruction - namely work - was also archetypally rural in character. It is in these senses that work camps were conceived by their advocates as exercises in an anti-urban education.

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