It was a rainy summer-holiday afternoon when I visited Haringey Council’s last surviving youth club seven years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it. Violence haunted the north London borough that year: four people had been killed in knife and gun attacks by the time I visited in August 2018. One victim, Tanesha Melbourne-Blake, was a peer mentor trainee at Bruce Grove Youth Centre. She had been killed in a drive-by shooting four months before my visit. She was 17.
I remember the teenagers, dressed in their school’s-out uniform of spaghetti-strap vests, baggy shorts and squeaky trainers, sitting in a circle on plastic chairs that stuck to your thighs as they spoke to me about what had happened. They cried. This was a place they came to escape crime, where the younger kids boasted about perfecting red-velvet cake recipes, growing courgettes in the on-site vegetable garden or recording tracks at the impressive studio on the premises. That confluence of innocence and experience stuck in my mind. You bake your first cake, you lose your first friend.
The genesis of this life, on what one of cultural critic Emma Warren’s interviewees describes as a “razor edge”, is captured in Up the Youth Club, her “hidden history” of youth clubs across Britain and Northern Ireland. This whistle-stop romp through the archive tracks the journey of youth clubs through all their (sometimes surprising) ideological guises. Paternalistic pillars of philanthropy, exemplified by the Eton Mission House Boys’ Club, set up in 1880 in Hackney by Old Etonians for young and increasingly literate factory workers to play football and attend concerts and lectures. Radical experiments in interracial mixing, such as the Harmony Club of 1950s Notting Hill, which invited Teddy boys in despite their attacks on British citizens arriving from abroad. Police-by-partying at the Blue Lamp Discos of Troubles-era Northern Ireland, when the Royal Ulster Constabulary would run dance clubs for teenagers, even entering culturally Catholic areas.
In Britain, at least, it appeared the establishment – the Church of England, public schools, Oxford and Cambridge – built up the youth club movement, only to tear it down again. Or, as Warren puts it, they were “opened up initially by wealthy patrons and later… sold off in service of their demographic descendants in government”. Her central thesis is that the grassroots momentum of youth clubs, even if it’s facilitated by the council or a church or a long-suffering responsible adult with a set of keys, sparks Britain’s creative energy – from the Specials to Banksy to Little Simz. She interviews east London grime legend Wiley’s father, a youth worker running music workshops, who says that “a lot of greatness has come from humble beginnings”. He refers to the austerity-era destruction of youth clubs as if it’s a distinct historical era: “the downfall”.
Whenever there’s a spate of knife crime or rioting in Britain, the political and media class spits out two sets of stats. If you tend to the right, it’s all about how few police there are on the beat. On the left, you’ll reach for the number of youth club closures. Young people have either been allowed to express themselves too much, or too little.
Despite this repetitive cycle of hand-wringing, the stats are worth repeating. In 2009, there were around 11,000 youth clubs across the UK. Four in ten young Londoners were attending a youth club weekly at least. But after the public cuts began in 2010, spending on youth services was slashed by 73 per cent, resulting in 1,243 council-run centres closing by 2023. And that’s only a fragment of the story, given so many other spaces depended on grants and charity funding that were also squeezed during the recession.
It’s a false economy, as revealed by a 2024 report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies which found the first causal links between youth clubs and levels of education and crime. Comparing neighbourhoods where there were youth club closures with those where there weren’t, the economist behind the report, Carmen Villa, found teenagers in the affected areas performed nearly 4 per cent worse in secondary school exams, and were 14 per cent more likely to commit crime. “Closing youth clubs was not cost-effective,” she concluded. “For every £1 saved from closures, there are associated losses of nearly £3 due to forgone returns to education and crime costs.”
Not that Warren dwells long on these numbers. In fact, she only dedicates four pages to the impact of austerity on youth clubs right at the end of her work. This is a little confusing for the reader, given the book is sold as the case for ensuring “their survival”. In fact, she emphasises that “we don’t need anything back, because we can’t ever go back. The youth clubs of the 1930s wouldn’t have suited the 1990s. We need what the conditions suggest now and in the future.” It’s a reasonable argument, but what then replaces the ping-pong table for a generation lonelier than ever, whose attention is bought and monetised by social media firms? In all her enthusiasm for archival material, Warren doesn’t reach that pressing present.
Warren’s celebratory tone and insatiable historical curiosity mean a torrent of secondary sourcing and interviews with nostalgic youth-work veterans. The characters are charismatic and anecdotes magpied from old government reports and newspaper clippings are fun, but it kept nagging me that there wasn’t a whole lot of youth in this book about youth clubs. Partly, this is the writer’s queasiness at using her own experience for copy. Primarily a music journalist, Warren worked as a mentor at the teen-run publication Live Magazine at a youth club in Brixton, south London. “No one buzzed the doorbell outside Live Magazine thinking that they’d later become ‘material’, which makes writing about any of this contentious to say the least,” she writes.
But I wanted to know more about the young contributor who wrote the “My teenage crack nightmare” cover story about having an addict parent, or the teen who turned up at the door straight from prison and was welcomed in to join the team. How did it affect the lives of her mentees, when the borough boundary between Lambeth and Lewisham “might as well have been a different kind of border, with passport control staffed by peers caught up in street-level politics”? What did one of her charges mean when she told her “you can leave a gang, you just have to leave strong”?
In her efforts to avoid “the worn-out trope of ‘keeping kids off the street’”, she deprives the reader of a rare insight into these relatively safe havens vanishing in the neighbourhoods around us. In my conversation with the Bruce Grove kids, this seemed to be the main message they wanted out there. Haringey – including its youth clubs – was so often misrepresented by the chiefly white and middle-class press.
“You can argue that, how the media portrays us, with regards to what people read, the community is not very safe,” I remember an 18-year-old girl, who had attended for six years, telling me. “There’s a lot of stigma attached to youth clubs and the kind of danger it may mean to you. But I’ve always felt safe here.”
Up the Youth Club: Illuminating a Hidden History
Emma Warren
Faber & Faber, 352pp, £18.99
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This article appears in the 10 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fight Back
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