Youth clubs in Britain have been quietly decimated. What’s even more telling is that so few people care John Harris
A The consensus seems to have settled recently in UK politics: that life for young Britons is not as it should be, and something must be done. We are told that teens and young adults in their 20s are lonely, phone addicts, “overdiagnosed,” and often… unemployedThis entails a great storm of proposals – from welfare reform to reform Reducing the size of the university Education – which seems to have more to do with the biases of older voters than the real-life problems faced by other generations. In the next election, extending the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds might do something to correct that, but I wouldn’t count on it. After all, there is something deep in the British psyche that favors age over youth, and thus denigrates and ignores youth in a way that sometimes seems almost pathological.
If you want a vivid example, consider the devastating loss of millions of young lives that continues to be bewilderingly overlooked. During the first 10 years of spending cuts that began in 2010, council funding for youth services in England and Wales suffered a real reduction of 70%. By 2023, there were about 1,200 publicly run youth centres closedMore than 4,500 workers were young They lost their jobs. Villages, towns and cities still bear the scars: empty buildings that look as forlorn as any closed library or sure-start centre. But while other aspects of the austerity disaster have at least been acknowledged, this one still feels like a strange sort of guilty secret, with no chance of ever recovering so much lost.
For anyone who wants to understand how tragic this is, it’s there now Set text: A recently published book, Up the Youth Club, by journalist and writer Emma Warren, is a brilliant work of social history, and a passionate call for a lively, modern version of everything she writes about. Its story goes back 150 years, and it is divided between the state sector and the voluntary sector. What ties everything together is the provision of what she describes as “warm and welcoming” spaces, where “those in their second decade of life can come together regularly… to do the things they love to do… and where restorative ‘hanging out’ is welcome.” There is fascinating material on pioneering meeting places for LGBTQ+ people, the centrality of youth clubs in the music scenes of cities such as Bristol and Coventry, and their role as focal points in new post-war cities. There is one theme that recurs again and again: the plain fact that youth services must be viewed as one of the essential elements of the public sphere.
As twenty-first-century conservatives renew their faith in blindly shrinking the state, the book also contains a timely example of why they should instead consider how their party might lose That is, a manifestation of social conscience. In 1958, the Conservative government led by Harold Macmillan ordered the creation of a watershed Report on youth serviceswas compiled by an aristocratic social reformer named Lady Diana Albemarle. From the perspective of 2025, much of what she depicted is grimly familiar: she found youth services “in a state of severe depression”, with the people who served them “neglected and receiving little attention, either in educational circles or by public opinion generally”. Youth provision is “dying on its feet,” she said. But as Warren describes, conservative politicians then made massive changes: 3,000 new buildings, 160 new sports projects, and expanded and newly professionalized youth services.
Years later, many of us enjoy the remaining legacy of it all: dependable places, open most nights of the week, where we can discover our identity. We learned how to deal with adults who were not our parents or teachers and therefore tended to treat us as equals and let us organize our own time. For me and my friends, this meant valuable practice time for us and our fellow teenage musicians, and the opportunity to perform in front of our peers. But for others, youth clubs represented something far more important: what we now call safe spaces, where they could be gently directed toward the kind of help that was often needed most.
Although the decline of youth clubs began in the Thatcher years, this is what austerity cruelly took away, and we are now living the consequences. In 2014, I reported on crushing local austerity in Newcastle, and drastic cuts to youth centres. One downtown youth worker told me what this means for drug and alcohol counseling and programs that focus on teen pregnancy. He also mentioned Alexis Jay’s Report on sex in children “We met many experienced and skilled youth workers who expressed serious concerns about the severity of the cuts to youth services and specifically how it affected their work with vulnerable young people.”
Furthermore, there is striking evidence pointing to cuts to youth clubs leads to Teenage crime increases and significantly poorer educational outcomes. But spending cuts have a particularly pernicious effect: the way they sooner or later distort many people’s thinking, so that yesterday’s crucial service is suddenly recast as today’s lackluster throwback. In this sense, it can be easy to think of youth clubs as old-fashioned spaces, synonymous with corny jokes about table tennis and flat Coke drinks. But, again, this is the point of view of the elderly, and in fact they remain vital places, as no end of research has been proven.
In 2009, before austerity began to attack London’s youth services, the Greater London Authority’s London Youth Survey found that 41% of respondents aged 11 to 16 attended youth clubs at least once a week. Last year another A piece of research — commissioned by the London-based organization Legacy Youth Zone — focused on what it called “isolation through screens,” and its corresponding “need for connection.” More than half of young people participating said they would like to reduce time spent in front of screens, but 46% felt “unable” to do so. Then came the surprise: “93% of young people who attended youth centers say it made a positive difference in their lives.”
Even if some of our politicians realize this point, they have not yet responded to it convincingly. The work has achieved little Advertisements about increased spendingbut the money is unlikely to extend to youth services. The amounts involved remain relatively small. Austerity Almost hacked By saving £1 billion a year from youth services, deep problems will remain, even though they answer many 21st century questions – about social division, polarized attitudes, and much more.
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Warren points out that youth clubs “can protect against divide and rule by offering deep, long-term protective relationships and training in teamwork,” thus offering something fundamentally modern. “They are the embodied, fulfilled result of the intention — to make room for the next generation,” she says. If there is any country that needs to answer this call, it is this country.