LONDON: Girl Guiding may conjure up images of cake sales, songs around the campfire and a myriad other things you’d struggle to believe modern smartphone-carrying girls would be interested in.

Yet they rushed to join up at the rate of one every hour last year, making it the biggest youth organisation in the UK. After 8,200 joined in 2011, the 102-year-old organisation boasts more than 538,000 girls.

The Boy Scouts claims 400,000 members. Put another way, there are a lot more Guides in the UK turning up for meetings each week than there are people in Iceland.

The Guides were formed after disgruntled youngsters gatecrashed the first Boy Scout rally at Crystal Palace [in south London] in 1909, calling for a club offering activities they could do.

Since then, the Guides have moved from a focus on domestic skills (bak-ing and sewing) to run campaigns against airbrushing in the media and plastic surgery.

After a study showed 50 per cent of its members aged between 16 and 21 years would consider surgery to achieve their ideal physical appearance, the association took its concerns to the government, calling for a kitemark (a UK quality certification mark) to be added to manipulated magazine images.

In the 1980s the organisation saw something of a downturn. But the creation of the Rainbows for girls aged five to seven in 1987 and a Jeff Banks-designed uniform in 1990 both helped to breathe new life into the organisation.

Since 2000 the organisation has annually hosted the Big Gig, which will see former X Factor contestants Olly Murs, Alexandra Burke and Matt Cardle take to the stage of the Birmingham LG Arena in March for an audience made up exclusively of Guides.

To celebrate its record achievement the organisation has appointed 24 “guiding lights”, some of whom are attending the UN’s commission on the status of women in New York this week. A far cry from a devotion to homemaking.

By arrangement with the Guardian