Youth clubs won’t just help kids - they could save the high street

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. The investment in youth clubs is a different conversation technically, but it points to the same gap, as a country we are running short of places where people can simply be in each other's company. Crucially, there is nothing uniquely London-specific about that gap, meaning this model could translate to towns and cities across the UK facing the same slow erosion of shared space.

And in this space, there could be a place for brands. If we are seeing a seismic shift away from screens, accompanied by a yearning for more human experiences, brands can step up. The government has effectively signalled that it will back physical communal, screen-free spaces providing an open invitation not just for youth-focused organisations but for anyone with a vacant property, a community relationship and the imagination to programme something worth attending. Think vibrant talks, live music, slam poetry, a Sunday panel that goes somewhere interesting, the kind of conversation that used to happen in a pub back room before pubs started closing at the same rate as everything else.

The brands already doing this well understand the return it is possible to get from a real experience, creating memories that media spend alone can’t manufacture, however much money you throw at the interruptive stuff. People who were there remember it, they tell others about it and then they come back. That is not a soft metric dressed up as strategy, but more an understanding of how cultural affinity actually works, because while you can’t buy the feeling of having been there, you can build the room.

What would be genuinely exciting is if this investment becomes a template rather than a gesture. Open up the planning rules around meanwhile use, back brands and collectives who want to take on disused retail units and turn them into something with a weekly programme, and by doing so, give the high street permission to become a place again rather than a retail concept that stopped working. The youth club announcement suggests there is political appetite for at least part of this. The rest of it is sitting there waiting for someone to pick it up.

The spaces exist, and the appetite for them is about to explode. As feeds get slowly dialled down, the case has just been made by the Mayor of London himself. Brands which understand community should be moving on this now, not waiting for someone else to take the first room.

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James Kirkham is the Founder of ICONIC.

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