Up the Youth Club (eBook)

Emma Warren (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
352 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-38923-0 (ISBN)

Infos

'A timely reminder of what we all truly crave as human beings - connection.' Doc Brown 'Warren hows why youth spaces matter - not just for young people, but for all of us.' Darren McGarvey 'Community, resilience, kindness . . . A story of people at their best.' Richard King A searching look at the rise and fall of the youth club by renowned cultural documentarian Emma Warren, highlighting the seismic impact they have had on UK culture and why we need to ensure their existence for future generations. 'Youth clubs have always existed. They always will, because there will always be young people. How we care for our youth, and what we owe them, is a question for all of us.' In Up the Youth Club, Emma Warren maps the shifting story of youth clubs in the UK and Northern Ireland, from factory workers in Victorian Boys' and Girls' clubs to renegade self-emancipatory spaces in the 1970s and the music-generating youth clubs of more recent decades. With a mixed lineage in church evangelism, the patronage of the upper classes, grassroots' DIY, and erratic state funding, the youth club has had a huge, yet almost invisible, effect on music, sport, culture and society. Arguing that we cannot advocate for what we do not understand, Warren positions youth clubs as a kind of engine room - from the famous success stories to come out of their doors, such as The Specials or Stormzy, to the untold stories of young people finding shelter, sustenance and stimulation for over a century - and why their dwindling numbers, largely due to austerity and funding cuts, is of serious concern for us all. With this impassioned history, Warren invites us to pick up the torch and play an active part in protecting and re-igniting this vital part of UK society.

Emma Warren has been documenting grassroots culture for decades. She is the author of Make Some Space (2019), which was a MOJO book of the year; Steam Down (2019) which was published by Rough Trade Books and named an Irish Times read of the year; and Document Your Culture (2020). Dance Your Way Home (2023) was a Guardian book of the year. A dual citizen of Ireland and the UK, she worked on staff at The Face and as the editorial mentor at youth-run Brixton publication Live Magazine. Her monthly radio show on Worldwide FM ran for six years.

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AN IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR'A timely reminder of what we all truly crave as human beings - connection.' Doc Brown'Warren hows why youth spaces matter - not just for young people, but for all of us.' Darren McGarvey'Community, resilience, kindness . . . A story of people at their best.' Richard KingA searching look at the rise and fall of the youth club by renowned cultural documentarian Emma Warren, highlighting the seismic impact they have had on UK culture and why we need to ensure their existence for future generations. 'Youth clubs have always existed. They always will, because there will always be young people. How we care for our youth, and what we owe them, is a question for all of us.'In Up the Youth Club, Emma Warren maps the shifting story of youth clubs in the UK and Northern Ireland, from factory workers in Victorian Boys' and Girls' clubs to renegade self-emancipatory spaces in the 1970s and the music-generating youth clubs of more recent decades. With a mixed lineage in church evangelism, the patronage of the upper classes, grassroots' DIY, and erratic state funding, the youth club has had a huge, yet almost invisible, effect on music, sport, culture and society. Arguing that we cannot advocate for what we do not understand, Warren positions youth clubs as a kind of engine room - from the famous success stories to come out of their doors, such as The Specials or Stormzy, to the untold stories of young people finding shelter, sustenance and stimulation for over a century - and why their dwindling numbers, largely due to austerity and funding cuts, is of serious concern for us all. With this impassioned history, Warren invites us to pick up the torch and play an active part in protecting and re-igniting this vital part of UK society.

Textauszug

Introduction

Hello, welcome, come on in

On the Northern Line, going south. A group of four get on and we’re all standing together, at the window end of a grimy London Underground carriage. Three young teenagers are accompanied by a tall man who positions himself in the middle of the group, slightly back from what would be a rough semi-circle if we weren’t on the Tube. No one’s on their phone. I’m immediately interested and my radar switches on because I’m seeing something that I can’t yet name. This is not a family group and they don’t look like a lost portion of a school trip either, the adult’s unlaced Timberlands at odds with a narrow interpretation of ‘business dress’.

He’s listening, actively, tuning in to the as-yet-unspoken. Around his neck is a lanyard that reads ‘Wipers Youth CIC’. I’ve never heard of the organisation but the presence of this ID reveals the dynamic. The ties between this group are social and have been built between the young people and their youth worker. Wipers, I discover later, specialise in improving the confidence and self-esteem of vulnerable youth through mentoring. Their tagline is appropriate for this Tube carriage context: A clearer vision for a safer journey.

One of the Wipers group is telling the youth worker about an everyday example of interpersonal teenage drama, which in this case involves money. Listening, the adult draws another youngster into the conversation, recounting what’s been said and seeking an opinion. He’s a conductor, quietly indicating who should speak and noticing what might need to be said, with low-key authority that keeps him simultaneously on the teenagers’ level and above it, offering off-hand observations instead of direct instructions.

Seamlessly, he steers the conversation around a gentle bend and another of the teens picks up the signal. Previously, this one has been silent, but he loves anime and can’t help but glow when he’s talking about it. He lights up, shifting from a kind of absence into presence simply by the opening up of space in which he can contribute with enthusiasm. Two stops pass as he recounts the entire plot of his favourite show, and it’s lovely to hear because this youngster, who’ll quickly be coded as troublesome above ground, is being childish in the best possible way, unselfconsciously. The group get off and I watch them walk up the platform. The youth worker is keeping time with the kids. He’s solid yet mutable, able to meld gently with what’s happening, utilising a kind of focus that appears softened and practical. For ten minutes, this man transformed the end of a Tube carriage into a youth club.

*

A central quality connects all the spaces in this book, whether they’re attended by five young people or five hundred, in a shed or a purpose-built centre. A youth club, as far as I’m concerned, is a broadly warm and welcoming space where those who are in their second decade of life can gather regularly, in person, without compulsion, to do things they like doing, or to discover what they like doing, where restorative ‘hanging out’ is welcome. Some of these are officially designated, others less so. Youth clubs are places of mutual aid, not easily flipped into private profit, which makes them political too: not political with a big or small ‘p’, but with a wavy one, drawn with a borrowed felt-tip pen.

The titular space comes in many shapes and sizes. Some of you might have an image in your head, perhaps relating to your own experiences or to demographically familiar places containing pool tables or PlayStations. For others, they’ll be cultural expressions of a distant past, like the coffee bars of 1950s Soho are for me. Youth clubs are a shifting entity, which adapts to whatever is available at a given moment in time. The youth club story has been acutely sensitive to changes in national, local and street-level politics; to culture as it arrives and leaves; and to ordinary community machinations in any given place. Sometimes they’ve been nationwide and plentiful; other times, as recounted above, they’ve been squeezed into the end of a Tube carriage. In their broadest sense, youth clubs are prismatic: you can look through them to see society from many different angles.

Youth clubs have been part of everyday life in the UK and Northern Ireland for over 150 years. Many people born before the start of the twenty-first century would have attended one, even as the youth service declined from the mid-1980s onwards. They’ve been maintained throughout history by a shifting and interconnected fascia of local authorities and voluntary or community organisations. Some have been run by the council in specially constructed buildings, attached to housing estates or schools. Others had a faith context, even if that was just someone in the congregation with keys and authority who’d allow local teenagers to stream through the doors.

Somewhere in the picture there will be adults, enabling access to whatever is on offer, and doing so through a unique dynamic. Motivated youth have repeatedly created spaces for themselves, by themselves: contemporary examples would be the skatepark or gathering places for rollerskaters, but even in these places, there are often helpful older people on the edges. Youth clubs can be sites of bonding across the generations, built out of choice.

Much of the existing discussion and documentation on the subject of youth clubs comes from the perspective of adult youth workers, with books, annual reports and articles discussing various aspects of their craft. Youth work has been much studied, but is abstract without spaces in which to enact it. I wanted to focus on youth clubs, in the broadest possible sense of the term, and try to understand what was happening when people attended them.

All societies have initiation rites, and many of ours have come adrift or been commercialised. I suspect that some of the necessary transition work that must happen between childhood and adulthood often takes place on weekday evenings, when teenagers can make noise, lounge about and experience an absence of structure alongside planned activities. The remaining survivor youth clubs, which operate in the tiny cracks available in hyper-capitalised towns and cities, show what’s possible and provide a blueprint for the rebuilding. I say this believing that optimism can be a form of defiance. And, just to say it out loud, 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. In this way youth clubs are an aspect of creativity itself, improvised into existence, aiming for harmonics. Among other things, they have long offered an affordable, and mostly accessible, rite of passage.

All of this was broadly the same wherever you lived in mainland UK or the North of Ireland, although with some structural and cultural differences. For example, the Boys’ Brigade was formed in Glasgow and fed into the foundations of Scottish youth work, much of which took place in schools. In Wales, many youth clubs had connections to community assets built and paid for by workers, often in mining communities. English history, meanwhile, meant time-rich wealthy people would often act as benefactors or volunteers. In Northern Ireland, the conditions were understandably unique. Each nation experienced phases in which government money flowed or was stemmed, with buildings and staff generated by committee reports, or removed and allowed to crumble.

It’s easy to accept that youth clubs have an impact on society. Even those who refuse to fund them would probably agree that they have a role, even if it’s just the worn-out trope of ‘keeping kids off the street’. Spending this time immersing myself in youth club histories led me to an additional idea: that identifiable parts of sporting and cultural achievements across these islands owe a big debt to lively teenagers and youth workers sharing physical space, especially those catering to young people who don’t have easy access to money or support within their family networks. Far from being an incidental place of leisure or charity, the youth club is an engine room.

Low and erratic funding has often meant that youth clubs have relied heavily on collective, grassroots resourcefulness. They are shaped by the young people who use them. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, therefore, that they’ve long been innovative spaces, fostering talent, and in turn being reflected through popular culture. Whether it’s TV show Byker Grove; The Smiths and their iconic representation of Salford Lads’ Club on the cover of The Queen Is Dead; Stormzy’s Merky FC in Croydon; Mercury Prize-winners Roni Size and Ezra Collective shouting out youth clubs across the decades; or spaces set up by or supported by boxers, from Henry Cooper to Anthony Joshua, youth clubs have had a cultural impact that has been almost entirely obscured.

Up the Youth Club is an attempt to give shape to the bigger story behind youth club life. It goes back further than I anticipated when I first set out. As I ventured back in time, I came across numerous descriptions...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 9.9.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• ISBN-10: 0-571-38923-6 / 0571389236
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-38923-0 / 9780571389230