The youth club – a scuffed-up room in a church hall or prefab building, with subsidized pop and snacks, pinball machines and pool tables, and a range of improving activities from dressmaking to scooter maintenance – is a uniquely British phenomenon. Youth workers see them as spaces for grassroots activism, as what Emma Warren calls “the embodied, actualised outcome of an intention – to make space for the next generation”. National and local governments, however, have seen them primarily as a means of preventing crime and anti-social behaviour by, in the well-known formulation, “keeping the youth off the streets”. In an ideal world, as Warren writes in this lively and fascinating history, young people would have as much right to exist in public as adults, and would be as welcome on the streets as anyone else. Sadly, the world we live in “fetishises youth while not liking actual young people very much”. And so we invented the youth club – then, in recent decades, let it wither away.
The problem for the youth-club historian is that no one is young for long enough to understand and articulate this phenomenon’s significance from inside their own experience. Luckily, Warren writes, “enough people across the ages have left fragments behind them, like a youth club Hansel and Gretel: breadcrumbs of books, speeches, reports, drawings, photographs and films”. She has done much useful digging in archives, official reports and old newspapers, and filled in the gaps by talking to former youth workers from the postwar years, many of whom must now be in their eighties or nineties.
The youth club’s roots lie in the late Victorian era, when missionaries, motivated by social or religious conscience, went into the inner cities to work with working-class boys. They were worried about widening inequalities and what young factory workers might get up to with their increased leisure time. The YMCA and the nonconformist churches provided spaces of Christian uplift for young people; the big public schools set up mission houses. Eton Mission House Boys’ Club, founded in 1880 in Hackney by Old Etonians, hosted dances, concerts and lectures for young workers, and has some claim to being the first proper youth club. University settlements, built in impoverished parts of east and south London, and funded by the colleges and alumni of Oxford and Cambridge, served a similar function. Uniformed organizations such as the Boys’ Brigade, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides followed.
Warren’s story centres on the youth club’s heyday in the years after the Second World War. This boom period was underpinned by the Education Act 1944, which called for local authorities to provide “adequate social and recreational provision” for young people. But the key moment was a report presented in 1960 by the Albemarle Committee and mostly written by two of its members, the cultural critic Richard Hoggart and the founder of the Woodcraft Folk, Leslie Paul. On its recommendations, 3,000 Albermarle-funded buildings – purpose-built and architect-designed, with sprung dancefloors and coffee bars – went up nationwide. These council-owned clubs did not require the formalistic professions of piety that many faith-run youth clubs insisted took place at the start of each evening’s activities. They were meant to fill the gap left by the end of National Service and were aimed especially at secondary modern pupils or those who had already left school – a sort of alternative students’ union for those with no prospect of going on to college or university.
The Albemarle Report also swelled the ranks of youth leaders or, as they were now called, youth workers. The number of full-time youth workers doubled over the next decade, with many attending the National College for the Training of Youth Leaders in Leicester. Youth workers tended to be more socially engaged than youth leaders, believing that working with young people could inspire real change.
In the post-Albermarle era, a less patrician, more do-it-yourself ethos evolved. In Coventry in the 1970s, a former Quaker meeting house, the Holyhead, hosted reggae and blues jam sessions in the basement, with a sound system run by Neville Staple of local band the Specials. It became central to the city’s multiracial ska music scene. Meanwhile, in London, a gay youth club movement emerged, with members including the comedian Paul O’Grady, Jimmy Somerville of Bronski Beat and the Communards, Andy Bell of Erasure and the choreographer Matthew Bourne. The League of Joi Bangla Youth nurtured young British Bengalis’ interests in fashion and music, as well as fighting the influence of the National Front. This flurry of creativity must have been helped by what Warren calls “the motivating role of boredom in the pre-internet age”.
The author sees the youth clubs of the mid-1980s (when she entered her teens) as a high-water mark, despite the by-then discouraging noises coming from the Thatcher government. Sport had always been a big aspect of youth clubs; they were notably fertile ground for table- tennis players. But now they began to foreground art and music, cultivating the talents of rappers, breakdancers, graffiti artists and DJs involved with early electro, hip-hop and house music. This continued into the new millennium, a lifesaver for those whose parents could not afford music lessons or expensive equipment. Grime music, a subculture of now global influence, took hold in east London youth clubs and on pirate radio in the early 2000s. Two Mercury prize winners, the drum and bass producer Roni Size and the jazz quintet Ezra Collective, give credit to youth clubs for jumpstarting their careers.
Warren’s story often focuses on youth workers, and there are some fascinating characters among them – such as the Methodist minister Jimmy Butterworth, who turned a derelict Victorian chapel in south London into a multi-arts venue called Clubland. Michael Caine, who started his acting career on the small club stage, called Butterworth “the most important person I ever met”. We hear about Sister Mairéad and Sister Geraldine, two fearless nuns running the Ichthus Youth Club in inner-city Belfast during the Troubles; and John Westfallen, prime minister of the Isle of Dogs when it briefly declared its independence in the early 1970s, who also ran a floating youth club on a Thames barge. I still wanted to hear more from the young people themselves, when the book offers only tantalizing flashes – like the young lad from Cushendall in Northern Ireland, acting out songs from Grease with his mates while the soundtrack played on the old-fashioned box record player, or the Ellesmere Port youth club that was a catwalk for early-1980s fashions: “At one point you’d be wearing golf jumpers, then the next week looking like a geography supply teacher, or wearing a deerstalker hat”.
Even in its post-Albemarle prime, the youth service took only a penny for every pound spent on education. With no statutory basis or guaranteed funding, youth clubs were often the first to be targeted for cuts. Governments rarely prioritize teenagers – most of them can’t vote, and they won’t be teenagers for long. Innately flawed spaces, youth clubs are also easy to criticize. Their buildings are often vandalized, thefts are common and the petrol in many a vicar’s car has been siphoned. Neighbours frequently complain about the noise. Warren, always on the side of the kids, sees this as “vexatious and literally anti-social”, the result of “unfairly weighted power dynamics”.
Another education act, in 1988, was the golden age’s death knell. It centralized education policy, moving power away from local authorities, which had a knock-on effect on the youth service. As Warren notes ruefully, youth clubs had their most famous televisual depiction – the 1990s BBC children’s drama Byker Grove, set in a youth club so as not to clash with the school-based Grange Hill – just as they were beginning to decline.
Even in 2009, though, there were still 11,000 youth clubs across the country, and 40 per cent of Londoners aged eleven to sixteen were using one regularly. Then, after the Conservative-LibDem coalition came to power in 2010, spending on youth services was reduced by 73 per cent. The only scheme to escape unscathed was David Cameron’s National Citizen Service, a now-defunct Big Society initiative. Local authorities sold off Albemarle buildings and made youth workers redundant. By 2023, 1,243 council-run youth clubs had closed. Recalling the origins of youth clubs in the work of public-school and Oxbridge missionaries, Warren says that they were “sold off in service of their demographic descendants in government”. Even according to the most instrumental “keep the youth off the streets” logic, this was a disaster. A 2024 report for the Institute of Fiscal Studies, The Effects of Youth Clubs on Education and Crime, found that closing youth clubs was “not cost-effective”, because affected teenagers were more likely to perform worse in exams and commit crime.
For all this narrative of decline, Up the Youth Club is a hopeful book. Warren spent most of the Noughties as an informal youth worker, employed as an editorial mentor by Brixton’s youth-run Live Magazine. She writes only briefly about this time, on the admirable principle that “no one buzzed the doorbell outside Live Magazine thinking that they’d later become ‘material’”, but this background clearly informs her sense of the profound, often unseen impact of these institutions, which still cling on in “tiny cracks available in hyper-capitalised towns and cities”. The story she tells shows young people not as social problems to be solved, but as creative agents in their own right. People in power rarely understand this, because the effects of youth clubs are visible only on the ground. Hard to justify by the conventional metrics of official evaluations and impact assessments, they suffer from what the environmental activist Chip Ward calls “the tyranny of the quantifiable”.
Warren agrees with Sam McCready and Richard Loudon, authors of a history of the Northern Ireland youth service, that “good people have a multiplier effect”. Youth clubs, she says, function as a “ circular economy”, with those who have used them paying it forward for the next generation. Numerous grime artists and producers have supported youth clubs after benefitting themselves. Stormzy established Merky FC in Croydon, a football pitch, recording studio and gaming centre; Skepta created a community music space at Selby Centre in Tottenham; and Prince Owusu-Agyekum (aka Rapid) and Ebenezer Ayerh (aka Slix) founded the Ruff Sqwad Arts Foundation in Poplar.
Teenagers “walk in spirals”, Emma Warren notes, taking an hour to walk to shops that are fifteen minutes away. Youth clubs work in similar ways, doing good work tangentially and circuitously, and “the forward motion that creates such environments will unfurl again, like it always has”. She reminds us that, in the Scooby-Doo cartoons, the ne’er-do-wells foiled by the gang of mystery- solving teenagers always complain about “those pesky kids”. The pesky kids at the heart of youth-club culture teach us, she writes, “the value of connection in community, a reminder that together we’re stronger”.
Joe Moran is a Professor of English at Liverpool John Moores University.
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