“Young people will always create”: Why physical space matters to the Museum of Youth Culture

As the  Museum of Youth Culture prepares to open its long-awaited physical space, Emma Warren, author of Up the Youth Club: Illuminating a Hidden History, dissects the importance of documenting youth with the museum’s community programmer, Lisa der Weduwe.

Lisa der Weduwe has a theory that explains why the previously niche, dusty field of archiving has become increasingly resonant and popularised. “People have an understanding of archives because they have social media,” explains the community programmer at London’s Museum of Youth Culture (MOYC). “There’s an inherent understanding. Your Instagram is an archive. People understand the function of it.” Among other things, her role at MOYC involves connecting local groups to the museum’s collections, whether that’s teenagers in Camden youth clubs or participants in their elders programme. 

The museum has operated as a digital archive since 2015. It grew out of a photo agency, PYMCA, which itself came from the cult magazine Sleaze Nation. Over recent years, MOYC have become part of the broader cultural firmament running a photography exhibition celebrating youth clubs alongside an actual pop-up youth club at the We Out Here festival, and hosting exhibitions including contemporary rave photographer Yushy and last year’s emo-centric I’m Not Okay. They were due to open a new physical space in Camden in 2025, but a leak in the basement has nudged the opening back to early in the new year. 

Water incursion hasn’t dimmed the ambition: the museum’s stated aim is to collect and preserve the real stories and impact of teenage life through a radical, national collection of objects and photographs. “We try and collect and collate the histories of teenagers and young people, from those who were part of whatever was being documented,” der Weduwe says of the museum’s aims, “whether that’s a music scene or a protest movement or being at school and having to do that five days a week.” 

Talking with der Weduwe, it’s clear that the concept of documenting culture is now more widely discussed and championed. In 2020, I DIY-published Document Your Culture as a ‘how-to’ guide encouraging people to tell their own cultural stories. In Sheffield, there’s the archival justice movement Dig Where You Stand, founded by DJ and writer Désirée Reynolds to unearth and share stories of people of colour living, working and putting down roots in south Yorkshire over hundreds of years. And in the capital, Rendezvous Projects have been delving into borough-based cultural histories, following super-cool publications about pirate radio and record shops, like Sound Waves, which compiled oral histories and personal archives of grassroots music and culture in Newham. In some cases, grassroots documentation is going large: in October, André Anderson took his collection of writing about St Raphael’s Estate in north-west London, Authors of the Estate, to the big screen, premiering the documentary at the flagship Vue in London’s Leicester Square. In short, archives are having an extended moment.

EMMA WARREN: Lisa, what’s your personal relationship to youth culture?

I was a proper little nightmare teenager. I wanted to rebel in any way possible. I discovered nu metal, which was angry and hyper and a lot of fun. That led me to emo and then metal. 

And you’ve just been to Bang Face…

There’s an interesting overlap between metal and people who go to raves. It’s the energy. Both are very community driven. I enjoy going to the rave and seeing someone wearing a Sunn 0))) T-shirt. I moved around a lot as a kid, so having a subcultural, music-based community was an anchoring point. Starting in a new school and recognising a band T-shirt was an immediate signifier to engage with people. 

I sometimes think of the dancefloor as a set of cross-border lily pads. If you’ve jumped on one, you can see the others and leap between them.

The spaces are so vital. They provide community, camaraderie, recognisable identity and shared values. We are community driven, as creatures, and music is the great connector. At the museum, we take a lot of public submissions, from people in their nineties to people who are young now. Music is the underpinning theme. The song that got played endlessly when you were 14, or how you met your first love. 

Dina Ziad-Westmaas runs a community project called Open Utrecht (OP& Utrecht) and uses the phrase “transcultural youthnicity” to describe how the energy of youthfulness is relevant across age brackets.

Yes. Society has changed, but the core experience of being young hasn’t. There’s a power in connection between people across ages, internationally. We want to make connections across generations – are your experiences that different to the 17- or 18-year-olds you’re being scathing about? That’s an underlying mission of the museum. 

Why do so many people love youth culture but assume the worst about young people?

There’s an element of “I did it best.” It’s not universal, but people can double down and use their own experiences to critique what’s happening now. You hear it all the time: “Young people don’t do anything any more,” or “Youth culture doesn’t exist these days.” There will always be young people and they will always be creating new things. Every generation does something different with their culture. It’s fluid, dynamic and ever-changing. 

Can you give us a sense of the breadth of the museum archive?

There are museums of childhood, but there’s not a museum anywhere that looks at the impact of young people on the world. We started as a photographic archive, with professional photographers looking at the post-war period, and it widened from there, with a focus on the 1920s to the current day in the UK. Including the present day is important. We have an amazing public submissions collection – stories that don’t usually make it past friends and family – and a growing object archive of tangible things, from a northern soul bag covered in patches to someone’s school leavers’ T-shirt or a set of flyers. 

A large part of your archive is online. What is the museum doing about digital precarity?

So much of youth culture happens in these online spaces and that brings challenges. These are commercial platforms, so if it’s not commercially viable, a corporation can cut the plug.

Like with MySpace…

MySpace says an error happened with data transfer. They lost the golden era from pre-2015 – the early internet, 2000s era. We did an exhibit about emo and loads of people were like, “I had all my photos on MySpace.” There’s also interesting stuff around how collections ensure their digital collections remain viable, beyond server costs. Technology changes quickly, so what might be a common format today could be obsolete in five years. So many photos I took as a teenager were on phones that are now bricked. 

A lot of my work is about the value of physical space. What’s the museum view?

It’s so key. When you look at how young people have shaped the society we live in, quite often there’s a space underpinning that. Going to the local youth club or a local venue. Coming together. Post-2008 and austerity, it’s been harder for young people to have space to call their own, to try new things out, experiment. We want the museum to be a space young people can think of as their own, to build a community, to be part of something. A space that doesn’t have an ulterior motive – to sell you something. 

What is the value of documenting youth culture?

In the last ten years, there’s been a real push to DIY archives and collections, and people understanding the value of collecting for the future. Documentation is a straightforward flag in the floor: we were here, and things happened because we were here. Archives are special places, arranged to last, so that in a hundred years, people can understand what it was like. 

What are the downsides of documenting culture? DJ and writer Elijah recently posted about this, including how much he hated being opted in – without consent – to people’s carousels.

It’s not about documenting everything. It’s about noticing important moments, marking it and being part of it. When I look through the collections, the people documenting culture were active participants. Documenting can be a way of engaging while remaining rooted and involved.

Agreed! I might need to add a caveat to any future editions of Document Your Culture. Another thing I’m interested in is who gets to archive. There’s often been a demographic distance between the people who took photographs and the people in the photographs.

In the 1940s and 1950s, working-class young people often couldn’t afford photography, so pictures were usually by outsiders. That changed when technology became more available. People can self-document and self-teach, but you can still see the difference when people have greater means to hold on to things. That’s harder when you’re constantly having to move.

Out to the Renters Union!

At the moment, we’re having a lot of conversations with young people who are very vocal about the fact they want physical space and to create community. That, for us, is very exciting. 

What thought would you like to leave us with?

There have been a lot of very interesting conversations about the commercialisation of space, how to act against that and how we’ll ensure creative DIY spaces for young people. Because even in the face of really difficult circumstances, young people will always create.