Making space for young people is an essential part of a functioning society,” writes Emma Warren in Up the Youth Club. All too often, it is up to young people themselves, and a few dedicated adults, to carve out that space and keep it open with the meagre state or private funds available.
The widely held idea that youth clubs exist primarily to keep youths off the streets isn’t quite accurate, as the author posits. Firstly, this implies that “pavements are bad places”, or that young people have less right to simply exist in public than adults. Instead, Warren insists, youth clubs are powerful engines of subculture bringing together youngsters from less privileged backgrounds and giving them the means and support to become cultural engines. Or simply hang out somewhere warm and safe.
Up the Youth Club is a celebration and not a sermon
Up the Youth Club is a celebration and not a sermon, however. Warren uncovers a recurring theme of youth workers challenged by their boisterous charges yet remaining unerringly determined to fight for them. New buildings are vandalised, thefts are common, and a curate responds to having motorbike-fanatic youths siphoning his car’s petrol by simply parking up with a near-empty tank.
Up the Youth Club unearths fascinating nuggets of social history. There are the clubs set up for drapers, youngsters working in the Victorian fabric industry, by those concerned that these young men would surely be up to no good (with each other).
Curiously, Up the Youth Club is concerned with history only. Warren’s narrative ends abruptly in the 2010s, with the Conservatives poised to gut funding to youth services.
The writer leaves us to fill in the gaps as to what more than a decade of neglect has resulted in for young people, culture and society. But for those looking for a blueprint to build their own youth engine, this book provides the one to go by.
India Block is a writer for The London Standard
Up the Youth Club: Illuminating a Hidden History by Emma Warren is out now (Faber & Faber, £18.99)
