Anyone looking into British mediumship keeps running into four letters: SAGB. The Spiritualist Association of Great Britain is the oldest of the country's major Spiritualist institutions – founded in 1872, twenty-six years after modern Spiritualism began in America. Unlike the Arthur Findlay College, which is above all a place of training, the SAGB was and remains a place where you can simply book a medium.
A winter evening in Marylebone
The Association tells its own founding story almost as literature. On 7 February 1872, a cold evening in Victorian London, around a dozen friends gathered at 16 David Street in the West End. Nothing is known of their backgrounds – only that they had a single purpose: to form a Spiritualist society. A few informal meetings later, on 10 July 1872, the Marylebone Spiritualist Association came into being.
The early years were hard. Meetings were held at changing locations across London, among them a carpenter's workshop and a former police court. Spiritualism was taboo, and prejudice ran so deep that the association occasionally changed its name unofficially – simply to be given rooms at all.
In September 1894 an anonymous donation of £50 secured a permanent meeting place on Mortimer Street. The opening address was given by Emma Hardinge Britten – the medium and author who had founded the magazine "Two Worlds" and from whom the principles of the Spiritualists' National Union derive.
Russell Square, Belgrave Square
Only in February 1930 did the association acquire permanent premises of its own: 42 Russell Square in Holborn. By then an impressive roll of names had served it – the novelist Florence Marryat, the journalist W. T. Stead, Alfred Vout Peters, Estelle Roberts, Annie Brittain, Horace Leaf, the trance healer Fred Jones, the trance and direct-voice medium Kathleen Barkel, Nan Mackenzie, Bertha Harris.
Not even the Second World War halted its work: an official air-raid shelter was set up in the basement and activities continued. Ena Twigg and Ivy Northage joined afterwards.
In 1955 came the great leap – a lease on 33 Belgrave Square, in the heart of Belgravia. The lease ran for 92 years and cost £24,500, a trifle by today's standards. The building was declared open by Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, commander of Britain's air defence in the Battle of Britain and an avowed Spiritualist. At the same time, following an approach to the Board of Trade, the association was renamed the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain.
For its ninetieth anniversary in 1962 six new rooms were built on the ground floor – specifically for sittings. In those years mediums such as the psychic artist Coral Polge, Lilian Bailey, Ursula Roberts, Doris Collins, Magdalene Kelly, Harold Sharp, Nora Blackwood, Robin Stevens and David Young sat there.
During refurbishment the rooms were named after the pioneers: Oliver Lodge Hall, the Dowding Wing and Conan Doyle Hall. On display to this day is a chair in which Arthur Conan Doyle is said to have written several of his Sherlock Holmes stories.
The move – and what it says about the times
At seven in the evening on 5 December 2010 the SAGB closed the doors of 33 Belgrave Square – after fifty-five years. The reason is sober and the Association states it openly: as leaseholder it had to maintain a building more than 175 years old whose decay was outrunning what made financial sense without owning the freehold. After the banking crisis, returns on investments had collapsed and donations dried up – the whole charitable sector was under pressure. Acquiring the freehold was abandoned on cost grounds.
What followed was a move to the Victoria Charity Centre on Belgrave Road; today the association sits in Battersea. This passage of its own chronicle is unusually honest for an institution proud of its history – it describes a descent through addresses without dressing it up.
What you can get there today
The stated purpose has remained the same since 1872: to offer evidence through mediumship of the continuation of the personality after physical death, and to relieve suffering through spiritual healing. The SAGB is a registered charity.
- Private sittings – face to face, by telephone or via Skype, £40 for 30 minutes
- Open circles, demonstrations and Sunday services
- Spiritual healing, plus self-healing and distant healing
- Workshops (£50 members, £60 non-members), lectures, classes, private tuition
- Counselling: bereavement, spiritual and relational counselling, regression and hypnotherapy – £80 per hour
- Zoom formats for classes, circles, workshops and events
Fifteen mediums are listed by name as available for private sittings. One of them is in our directory: Dorothy Young, CSNU, who also leads an open circle of her own there.
The most honest paragraph on their website
What the SAGB tells visitors in advance is remarkable. Under the heading "Notice to Sitters" it states, in substance: every sitting is an experiment and its success cannot be guaranteed. No medium can deliver the specific evidence a sitter wants. A medium's work is to provide evidence of survival – not to predict the future. And anyone dissatisfied with a sitting must say so within the first ten minutes; after that there is no refund.
That is not advertising copy but expectation management of a kind one would wish to see more often. It fits what we described in our overview of British certifications: British Spiritualism has assessed mediumship through structured procedures for over a century – and speaks strikingly soberly about the limits of what a medium can do.
Sources: The Association's website, sagb.org.uk – in particular the pages "History of the Association" (chronicle 1872–2015), "About the Association", "Sittings", "Mediums' Profiles" and "Guide to Fees". Prices and opening hours may change; the Association's own information always takes precedence.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection – it gathers further articles on mediumship, training and assessment procedures.