Up the Youth Club: Emma Warren in conversation with Jack Young
Description
Join us when we welcome Emma Warren to discuss her book Up the Youth Club with Jack Young
'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.
Lineup
Emma Warren
Emma Warren has been documenting grassroots music and culture for decades. She is the author of Dance Your Way Home (Faber, 2023), which was a Sunday Times book of the week, a Guardian book of the year, and forms the basis of the Southbank Centre’s recently announced summer season 2025. Other works include Steam Down: Or How Things Begin (Rough Trade Books, 2019), which was an Irish Times read of the year. Make Some Space and Document Your Culture were published on her own Sweet Machine imprint. The British-Irish dual national and south east Londoner worked as a journalist on magazines including The Face, and as a mentor at youth-run Brixton publication Live. She currently runs a weekly writer’s programme at Woolwich Creative Club, a free after-school music project for 9-16 year olds. Her radio show on Worldwide FM ran for six years.
Jack Young
Jack Young is a writer and socially-engaged artist and curator. He makes hybrid work exploring land justice, subversive natural histories and hauntings of landscape and archive. His debut chapbook is URTH (Big White Shed, 2022), he co-edited the book Haunting Ashton Court: A Creative Handbook for Collective History-Making (2023), and his most recent books are in the country garden/the end of england (SPAM Press, 2023) and Island of Us: Conversations about Justice with Children (Chisenhale Gallery: 2024), which was selected by Turner Prize winning artist Jasleen Kaur as one of her 2024 cultural highlights in The Guardian. He also co-hosts the literary podcast Tender Buttons, where recent guests include Max Porter, Bhanu Kapil, Lola Olufemi, Sheila Heti, Rebecca May Johnson, Octavia Bright, Melissa Febos, and Preti Taneja, among many others. He recently joined Somerset House as a creative producer on their Upgrade Yourself programme for young artists aged 18-30 from underrepresented backgrounds. Upgrade Yourself various strands aim to create space for young people to experiment and turn their ideas into action, develop critical consciousness, and anchor creativity as both an artform and a tool for social transformation for the cultural changemakers of the future.
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