Inside London's new Museum of Youth Culture

It feels appropriate that Lisa der Weduwe is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “TIME IS NONLINEAR”. As Archive Projects Manager at Camden’s newly opened Museum of Youth Culture, the 33-year-old is partly responsible for ensuring that this monument to youthful innovation is anything but a staid walkthrough where one historical event dutifully follows another. Instead, the colourful museum is vibrant and alive, with intermixed eras, cultures and formats all jostling for attention.

“One of our big arguments,” explains Lisa der Weduwe, holding court in the café on the museum’s ground floor just a few days after its grand opening, “is that the creativity and ingenuity of young people are what drives society forwards. That isn’t acknowledged, but I think it’s really important. Young people are so often at the forefront of social justice movements. Look at Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter: young people have really been pushing them forward, changing things and opening up new conversations.

“It’s a potent mix where you have a sense of independence, but you don’t have the responsibilities of being an adult. You’re looking at the world with new eyes because you’re trying to set yourself aside from the generation that’s gone before you. Because of your brain development, you’re also more likely to take risks and go into things head-first. That has led to so much positive change and creativity, and we should be celebrating that.”

Der Weduwe and the team have certainly risen to this brief – not least because their cultural hub has no permanent exhibition; rather, three temporary displays pay tribute to adolescent rebellion. Like youth culture itself, the museum has many guises. To ensure its accessibility, you’re invited to choose a price for entry. It’s capped at £10, but if your price happens to be ‘free’, so be it.

The world’s first youth culture museum dates back to 1997, when London-based photographer and Sleazenation magazine co-founder Jon Swinstead launched the Photographic Youth Music and Culture Archive (PYMCA), a library of images from youth culture that he collected and maintained in his garden shed. From 2015, with the help of curator Jamie Brett, it became a public digital archive consisting of more than 100,000 items. After a brief period at the sadly shuttered Printworks in south London, the latest site is the museum’s first permanent physical home.

Ahead of the move to Camden, der Weduwe and the team were in two minds about using the ‘M’ word at all. “We were discussing whether to be a ‘museum’ of youth culture or something else,” she says. “Young people don’t go to museums. They’re the least likely group of society to [do so] because museums don’t do a very good job of catering to young people – they’re very good at catering to children and families.”

With a laugh, she admits: “We’ve done ourselves a disservice by calling ourselves a museum when it comes to bringing young people through the door – but we needed to do that for the gravitas. It says, ‘This is such an important story.’”

Located on St Pancras Way, a short walk from the punks and goths who still congregate on Camden High Street, the new venue heralds itself with a multicoloured mural that boasts “100 YEARS OF YOUTH CULTURE UNDER ONE ROOF”. Inside the industrial-looking building, you’ll find the aforementioned café and possibly the world’s coolest museum gift shop, courtesy of Rough Trade. You’ll also find an exhibition space that’s currently displaying ‘Dancing Down The High Street: Club Culture in Camden 1988–2000’, a collection of photos and rave flyers that evoke the last pre-digital party days that shook the streets right outside the door.

In addition to this, there’s a small library of books that reflect the museum’s mission statement, including Emma Warren’s Up the Youth Club: Illuminating a Hidden History. As I’m chatting to der Weduwe, a group of teenagers wander over to the bean bags scattered about the library and each take a seat, chatting and mucking about, confidently making the space their own. According to joint research by the YMCA and the trade union Unison, more than 760 youth centres closed in England and Wales between 2010 and 2020. If you’re a young person in the UK, this kind of ‘third space’ – somewhere that isn’t your home, workplace or place of education – is in short supply.

“Post-austerity, with the closing of all the youth clubs and [the decline of] youth provisions,” says der Weduwe, speaking over Klaxons’ Day-Glo nu-rave cover of ‘Not Over Yet’ as it pulses from the museum’s speakers, “in the last couple of years, there’s been a lot of discussion of: ‘How can we better support young people?’ We want this to feel like a place where you can hang out. We encourage people to sit and have a read, and we have a foosball table.” Plans are afoot for the museum to host an actual youth club and various workshops, too.

Downstairs, the hangar-like main room is currently occupied by ‘Subculture Street Party’, a vast photography exhibition that depicts teenagers stepping out in parent-baiting outfits throughout the ages. From a cardboard cut-out of a 1920s flapper astride a motorbike to a young woman scoffing a burger and chips after a night out at Deptford Northern Soul Club, the whole story is right here. “We wanted it to be joyful,” explains der Weduwe. “We want to start with a really positive message about how young people come together, curate and shape things.”

A second downstairs space contains the venue’s most interactive and perhaps most fascinating exhibition, ‘Things I lied to my parents about’. This oral history was devised and produced by the museum’s youth collective of participants aged between 16 and 23, who’ve gathered visitors’ handwritten testimonies of fabulous – and sometimes poignant – fibs. One, signed by “Phil”, reads: “Bracknell, 1980: At 15, I told my parents I was dating a family friend’s cousin, Dawn. It was actually a family friend’s cousin, Steve.”

The exhibition is based around a recreation of a teenager’s bedroom, replete with a bed you can sit on as you take it all in; this isn’t the kind of museum to have a finger-wagging sign telling you to keep off. All in all, it sums up a mischievous enterprise with a healthy disregard for doing what you’re told.

Before I head back out to the streets of Camden, I get chatting to a group of teenagers gathered in the library on the ground floor. It turns out they’re students visiting the UK on a class trip. “We’re from East Germany,” explains 19-year-old Marlene, who notes that self-expression was “forbidden” in the repressive climate of the German Democratic Republic before the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. “It’s important to know what other countries’ youth cultures could do,” she says.

Sitting beside her, 18-year-old Eleni adds: “Youth culture is changing all the time. It’s a fight against rules, politics and the government.”

The Museum of Youth Culture reflects the kineticism and vitality of Eleni’s observation. Contrary to what the name might suggest, it’s not an exercise in nostalgia. This is a place where everything is always happening all at once – where 100 years of history, rebellion and youthful innovation dances towards the future, right before your eyes.