Pele visits Stowe Youth Centre.Stowe Youth Centre was a special place. Pele visited in the 1980s. Ten years earlier, the Police Station next door on the Harrow Road had been firebombed by residents. The Harrow Road has long been an area with challenging poverty and tension because of the intersection of major estates. The youth centre provided desperately needed space, and community for young people, 70 percent of whom had no access to computers. Even politicians came to launch their white papers on education as it was so near Parliament and was considered a centre of excellence. Memorably, Garry Kasparov came to play chess with our chess club in 2007. For ten years I ran ‘The Cut Magazine’ with my friend Nina Manandhar. Thirty young people would come in every Wednesday to interview and photograph those they wanted in their magazine. Interviews ranged from the Wu-Tang Clan to one of the first debates with the police on ‘Joint Enterprise’. With 1000 other youth centres in the country, we lost all our funding in the government cuts, and my inspirational boss, Michael Dipple, lost his job after thirty-three years.
Gary Kasparov visits Stowe youth centre.
Using our last savings, we were making a film about the closure of the youth centre when the Grenfell Tower fire occurred. It threw the world of the young people making the film upside down, as they lost friends. Grenfell was 10 minutes from our youth centre. Many tower residents had grown up with Michael as their youth worker. The young people were low from the closure of the youth centre and Grenfell was rock bottom.
