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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 museum will open it’s doors to the public on June 20. It celebrates teenagers and all their messy, hedonistic, hormonal, rebellious and naive edges. Opening just days after the government has announced a ban on social media for under-16s, it couldn’t have come at a better time.
What is the Museum of Youth Culture?
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. Later it became a digital archive, which opened to the public 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.
What’s the Museum of Youth Culture like inside?
Found at St Pancras Campus round the corner from Camden Road station, the MOYC is a free and interactive museum spread across several spaces.
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 permanent collection, and one space for temporary exhibitions. Here you will also find the archive, which isn’t open to visitors at present. The subterranean space is low-lit, with a fittingly club-like atmosphere.
What are the best things to see at the Museum of Youth Culture?
The vibrant permanent collection tells 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 then some.
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.
In the second room, the first temporary exhibition, curated in collaboration with the MOYC’s youth collective of 16-23-year-olds, is a brilliant and hilarious exploration of the lies we tell our parents. Here, lies aren’t strictly a bad thing, but a necessity that help teenagers discover who they are by bending the rules a little. It explores everything from the snacks we hid in our school blazers, to the rise of daytimers – secret day parties thrown by south Asian teens whose parents wouldn’t allow them out at night. In the interactive space there’s a recreation of a teenager’s bedroom, a gashapon capsule vending machine dispensing ideas for your next day out (such as ‘visit the Barbican conservatory’) and a wonderfully nostalgic soundtrack of Charli xcx, Kesha and LMFAO blasting through the speakers.
The highlight is a series of heartwarming and audacious handwritten stories detailing some of the biggest lies people told as teens. Tales involve secretly attending a protest in London only to end up on ITV news, first loves (and heartbreak), and breaking out of your grandparents’ house to see a punk gig at Brixton Academy. Reading these stories, I can feel my own core memories being unlocked. Suddenly, I’m taken back to being 16 and telling my mum I was sleeping over at my friend Helen’s house, when really I was raving to drum ‘n’ bass at a Cornish farm we had affectionately nicknamed ‘crack den’. Sorry mum!
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.
Museum of Youth Culture, St Pancras Campus, 100 Royal College Street, NW1 0TH. Open from Sat June 20. Free.
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