“I was sat on the tube on the Northern line going south and I noticed a group get on – a man and three young people. There was something happening that I couldn’t quite recognise. They’re not from school. They don’t look like a family group.”
Emma Warren, a journalist and author of Up the Youth Club: Illuminating a Hidden History, explains to Helen Pidd how she realised that the man she was observing was a youth worker. “Bringing people in, dropping them out. I was watching someone extremely skilful. He was turning the end of the tube carriage into a youth club, and he was conducting a conversation.”
Warren outlines the devastating impact a decade of austerity has had on Britain’s network of youth centres, and explains how the youth club is, in many ways, a distinctly British phenomenon – shaped by the stark inequalities of the Industrial Revolution, the aftermath of the second world war and the optimism of the postwar era. Warren explores the substantial cultural impact such clubs have had on the country, and explains the difference a skilled youth worker can make to a young person’s life.
Finally, Warren and Pidd discuss the UK government’s new strategy for youth services and consider whether it will be enough to pull Britain’s youth clubs back from the brink.
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Photograph: Christopher Thomond
