Modern Spiritualism emerged in the state of New York in the 1840s, alongside a flurry of new religious and utopian social movements that spread to the UK shortly afterwards. Modern Spiritualists saw themselves as anti-superstitious – claiming that theirs was a ‘religion for the age of reason’, whose main purpose was to provide ‘empirical’ proof of life after death.

The organisations whose buildings we visited – such as the Society for Psychical Research – deliberately strove for legitimacy through their proximity to the new scientific and cultural institutions of the nineteenth-century British capital. Other sites on the tour included the Royal Geographical Society, the College of Psychic Studies, the First Church of Christ Scientist, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), and Baden-Powell House.