Read time: 4 minutes
Emma Warren’s Up the Youth Club: Illuminating a Hidden History traces over 100 years of UK youth club history through the people who built them. It’s an important read for anyone who lives, works, or volunteers with young people – and it resonates deeply with what we do at Make (Good) Trouble.
Warren writes with warmth, love and humour (and sometimes with understandable anger) about the most valuable of spaces – the youth club. Her style is accessible and engaging, never academic or dry, even when the subject matter centres on funding cuts, closures or decades of undervaluing youth work.
Why this book is important to Make (Good) Trouble
At Make (Good) Trouble, our goal is to create safe spaces young people want to be in: delightful, joy-filled, rewarding spaces where they feel free to be themselves, to learn, or hang out, or play, or just be with other young people from their community, or with shared interests. Spaces where they have a trusted adult or two in their lives.
Up the Youth Club paints a picture of the passions and hard work of some of the remarkable people who have set up youth groups and clubs around the UK over the last 100 plus years. These clubs have given young people safe havens, inspiration, and – as Warren puts it – help finding their voice and their tribe. And that’s always been our goal.
“An era of measurement” – why youth club funding is always precarious
Youth work in the UK has never been a statutory service. Unlike education or healthcare, there’s no legal requirement for local authorities to fund it. Warren describes this as “the swinging pendulum of feast and famine.”
She also traces a shift that began under Thatcher’s government: an “era of measurement,” where authorities started demanding proof that youth clubs reduced crime, improved employability, or delivered other measurable outcomes.
Warren argues that, “much like parenting, youth club results emerge with a time lag.” In our own experience, no funding pot waits long enough for genuinely measurable results, more’s the pity. But the evidence across this entire book shows us just how valuable these spaces really are.
The make-do-and-mend history of grassroots youth clubs
Warren shares brilliant examples of clubs founded by people who saw a gap – who built the thing they themselves had needed but never had growing up. These clubs put young people at the heart of decision-making, creating spaces they genuinely wanted to be in.
There are delightful, often funny stories throughout of the (necessary) make-do-and-mend approach – or “collective, grassroots resourcefulness” – to finding spaces, volunteers, skills’ experts, and funding to get a club up and running – a pattern that repeats across generations and across the country. Warren describes laughing out loud at “so much teenage comedy” and that really struck a chord with me. I love her idea that “every youth club could generate a novel or standup show, ideally ones directed by the kids themselves.” Yes!
As Warren concludes:
“Youth is transient and no one is young for long enough to articulate all of this from within. But, luckily for us, 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. Taken one at a time, they tell interesting individual stories. Together they form an irrefutable chorus. Youth clubs are socially and culturally powerful, even as their full effects are impossible to measure.”
A practical resource, not just a history
Beyond the history, the book ends with a genuinely useful set of suggestions aimed at:
- Politicians and policy makers
- Youth workers and youth club committees
- Parents, carers, and responsible adults
- School governors and senior leaders in education
- Young people themselves
You know who you are. It’s worth reading the book for this section alone.
FAQ
What is “Up the Youth Club” about?
It’s a book by Emma Warren exploring the history of youth clubs in the UK over the past 100+ years, told through interviews with people who attended them, those who founded and ran them and people who’ve done extensive research into youth work. Plus it’s about the ongoing struggle to fund and value youth work.
Who is Emma Warren?
Emma Warren is a UK author and journalist known for writing about music, culture, and community. Up the Youth Club is her deep dive into the history and social importance of youth clubs. You can follow her on Instagram.
Why does youth club history matter today?
Because youth work remains non-statutory and chronically underfunded in the UK, understanding its history helps make the case for why these spaces are worth protecting and investing in – for young people’s wellbeing, community, and sense of belonging – particularly, as Warren notes, “in times of crises relating to the climate, politics and the economy.”
Where can I buy the book?
Up the Youth Club is available in paperback (now subtitled, ‘A Love Letter’) from your local independent bookshop or online from publishers Faber & Faber.
👋 Find out more about how Make (Good) Trouble creates safe, joyful spaces for young people: What we do.