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A grimy back street in Vauxhall overlooking the busy London to West Country rail line is perhaps not where I was expecting to meet the man who has pioneered investment research in the burgeoning ethical and eco-friendly space.

No hi-tech solar panels, no roof-mounted wind-turbines, and barely a whiff of a union presence, the professional hub of Eiris (Ethical Investment Research Service) is slightly disappointing on first sight. I find Peter Webster, its executive director and founder in his office, a one-man island in the sea of paperwork that flows outward from him.

Strip-lighting buzzes overhead and the constant drone of a team meeting being conducted next door is audible through the flimsy wall. It is a little hard to comprehend that more than 2800 companies spanning the FTSE-defined developed world report to and are researched by a dedicated team of 63 staff from this office. Eiris generates £3m in turnover and has a global client base of retail fund managers, banks, private client brokers, government bodies and pension funds.

Yes, Eiris has expanded and recently opened a small US office in Boston manned by three staff, and the day I met with Mr Webster, Eiris's Paris office opened.

However, it is from humble beginnings that the research charity and the socially responsible investing movement grew.

At 19, Mr Webster, a member of a young Quaker group from Quaker/Christian parentage, was involved in investigating the underlying investments of the Quaker Church. The youth group was alarmed by apparent links to apartheid-riven South Africa and investments in military hardware, so they collated their findings, made recommendations and presented at a national Quaker conference. Simultaneously, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation was seeking to diversify its investments using ethical principles and the British Council of Churches was concerned its ethical investments were too driven by the issues deemed pertinent by the Press.

Joseph Rowntree's Trevor Jepson, BCC's Elliott Kendal and Mr Webster gathered to form an independent research charity, charged with establishing how ethical principles could be applied in practice to the investment world. Mr Webster - selected, he jokes, for his ability to use a word processor (in the 1980s), having made money after university by formatting other students' theses - was one of two founding staff at the Eiris Foundation, then based in King's Cross.

"As a group of young Quakers, we learnt an awful lot about investments just by coming up with concerns from the ethics perspective," he explains, "That means we were always focused on the actual choices investors could make and the practical problems they could run into, rather than than the many other projects looking at theory of corporate responsibility and principles-based investing."

Eiris originally relied on third-party data and legally-required reports by the companies they were investigating, operating an investor subscription service to fund the charity. As time went on and corporate social responsibility ratcheted up boardroom agendas, companies were increasingly inclined to submit their own reports. Initial turnover was just £30,000, he declares with astonishment.

But isn't there a risk that Eiris's research is founded on companies' own assessment, I posit. "There is that risk," he admits. "There is a danger that they lie to you or focus only on the things that matter most to them, but there are strategies for trying to get round that."

He points to increased stakeholder involvement, the emergence of company engagement as an SRI strategy, and third-party verification as a means of keeping check. "Although each step of that process could go wrong, overall there is no doubt that companies are much more alive to these issues than they were 15 years ago," he says.

The SRI/ethical space has experienced unprecedented growth. In the 10 years to December 2007, the number of unitholders in pooled SRI retail funds has grown five-fold to 720,312; the AUM of these funds grew from less than £199m in 1989 (six years since Eiris's launch) to £8.88bn in December 2007.

Despite the reliance on SRI/ethical terminology to describe such funds - "there is huge frustration at our end that people talk about ethical funds as though they are all the same" - Mr Webster believes the diversity of objectives, strategies, investment styles and fund mandates makes the creation of a new IMA sector to house them unworkable.

"I favour flags within established sectors. If more sectors were created to house all of the ethical/green strategies and the different strategies they pursue, you would have myriad of sectors and that would be worse than useless ," he says, "One thing not to do is look at ethical funds and simply see which performed best." Instead, he urges advisers to explore the SRI policies of funds, check this against actual stock holdings and ensure those findings fit with the client's broader investment plan.

"Don't throw away your normal analysis just because it has an ethical label," he adds.

SRI funds have generally withstood the credit-induced turmoil well. The IMA reports retail inflows increased from £27.6m in Q1 to £49.5m in Q2, which the IMA's chief executive construed as reflecting investors' appetite for diversification as well as "reflecting a longer underlying trend to invest in this product type".

Mr Webster believes the nature of the current market turmoil actually makes a case for such investments. "On one level, the idea of knowing what you own, where that money is going and whether you agree with that, could not have received a bigger boost than all that has just happened. It’s so obvious that shareholders are better off asking those questions. In a way, the problem has been that there wasn’t enough of us doing that type of thing up until now," he shrugs.