Museum of Youth Culture

Teenagers often get a bad rap. Since the ‘50s, they’ve been labelled everything from rebels without a cause to couch potatoes, yobs and feckless youths. In the 2020s, young people are branded as or anxious snowflakes, or entitled and workshy phone addicts. Finally, the Museum of Youth Culture (MOYC) has said: Enough! We have a lot to thank young people for, actually. 

London’s newest permanent museum celebrates teenagers and all their messy, hedonistic, hormonal, rebellious and naive edges. It’s the world’s first permanent archive of items relating to young people. Founded in 1997 by Jon Swinstead, a photographer who ran Sleazenation magazine in the late ’90s, the MOYC started as a grassroots effort to preserve photographs, flyers and stories, before becoming a digital archive in 2015. 

After almost 30 years, this is the museum’s first brick-and-mortar space. The collection spans more than a century of youth culture history from across the UK, Europe and beyond. Through photos and objects collected from and submitted by members of the public, it tells uplifting, funny and moving stories from real lives.

Visitors enter on the ground floor to find a bar/café and merch shop decked out with commissioned neon illustrations by Mark Wigan and a gallery of Camden nightlife flyers and photographs. Don’t miss the custom foosball table created by artist Katie Town, populated by characters from different subcultures. 

Below this are two more galleries – one space for temporary exhibitions, and a vibrant one permanent collection telling the history of the teenager through photographs, fashion, technology, oral histories and other ephemera. Subcultures including emos, Teddy Boys, goths, mods, rockers, skaters, nu-metal heads, breakdancers and K-pop stans are all represented. 

And the focal point of the gallery is a whopping custom-built soundsystem created by Linett Kamala, the first woman to DJ at Notting Hill Carnival in 1985. Looking at how teenagers gather, communicate and forge their identities, the gallery explores the importance of the high street, tells the story of illegal rave culture, and invites visitors to share and record their favourite teenage memories via a realistic recreation of a phone box. 

Clearly curated with love, MOYC is a joyful ode to teenage life. It commemorates the past but also looks at the present, documenting the lives of young people as they unfold in real time. No matter your age, a visit here is guaranteed to have you misty-eyed and looking back at the good old days. After all, we were all young once.