Could youth clubs solve Britain's fairness problem? With Emma Warren

I'm Connor Nacken, Senior Researcher at the Intergenerational Foundation. We're a research charity advocating on behalf of younger and future generations in the UK We work on the big policy challenges shaping the lives of young people, from housing and taxation to student finance and the labour market. Our work focuses on exposing intergenerational unfairness and trying to advocate for practical, evidence-based reforms. In this new podcast series, we'll be speaking to some of the UK's leading experts on the issues that matter most to younger and future generations. My guest today is Emma Warren, a writer and cultural documentarian and author of Up the Youth Club, Illuminating a Hidden History. Emma has written extensively about grassroots culture and music, including in Make Some Space and Dance Your Way Home. And her latest book tells the hidden history of youth clubs across the UK. and asks what happens when those spaces disappear. Here at IF, we spend a lot of time thinking about the institutions that support younger people. We often talk about schools and universities, housing and the labour market, but youth clubs are another important part of that story. They gave generations of younger people somewhere to go, something to do, adults they could trust, and spaces to become themselves. Emma, thank you very much for joining me.

Well, thank you very much for having me.

So you've spent a lot of your career writing about the spaces and places where people meet and gather. So I think perhaps the best place to start is with how you first came to the topic of youth clubs in particular and why you felt that there needed to be a history or story of youth clubs in the UK.

Well, I suppose the first thing to say is that you're quite right. My work is about cultural spaces where people gather, often on a very local, grassroots street level, and that those places are inherently valuable. And I think there's a misconception about youth clubs that they sit in a particular part of the world, which is like some kind of dusty subsector of charity. But I'm saying, well, no, actually, they're kind of engines of culture. They're culture machines. But the other thing to say at this point is that I consider all these things to be rooms in the same house. The youth club, the street corner, the grassroots music venue, the village hall, the village green, the park, public space where people can assemble to do their things. are all connected and they're all essentially different versions of the same thing a safe and accessible place where people can just go and be and that is particularly valuable for young people as so evidently shown in the work that you do here you know young people get a raw deal officially

Well, we agree. And I think we'll come on to that in some more detail in a little bit. But I think it'd be good as well to start by giving a sense for people who've never been to a youth club. I suppose in some part of the popular imagination, some people might just think of them as a building with a ping pong table. And I think that is a kind of characterisation that you strongly dispute. But at the broadest level, what actually is a youth club? And why do you