The Mayor of London’s pledge this week to spend £30 million funding a late-night youth club in every London borough is a positive step towards creating physical spaces for young people to gather, and thereby tackling youth anti-social behaviour.

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Youth clubs used to get a bad press, or more accurately, no press at all. The ones that still survive usually sit in the unglamorous end of social infrastructure, the part that doesn't photograph well or trend. But they do something that almost nothing else does: they give people somewhere to go that isn't optimised or mediated by an algorithm. Young people can just turn up. And this is rarer than it sounds in 2026.

The bigger story here is about the state of the high street. Retail has been hollowing out for years and what has replaced it is mostly empty units. The ghost of a gathering place with nothing left to gather around.........

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