Museum of Youth Culture

YOUTH CLUB is a non-profit organisation working to preserve, share and celebrate youth culture history through a passionate network of photographers and creatives, working towards the goal to open the world’s first Museum of Youth Culture in London by 2023.

The collection began with Sleazenation magazine’s PYMCA (Photographic Youth Music Culture) archive, established in 1997, and was fully renovated and restored into the non-profit YOUTH CLUB Archive in 2018.

The archive has continually grown through a growing network of contributors connecting the past, present  and future generations, through imagery, features and texts on a range  of topics.

Proudly collaborating with FORMAT19, YOUTH CLUB rewinds to analogue, inviting visitors to the festival to explore the previously un-exhibited, Physical Transparency archive. Usually found at Printworks, London – a large warehouse club and former printing factory, this archive comprises of six filing cabinets of photography and related ephemera, that will be presented in the Museum of Youth Culture exhibition at FORMAT19.

Showcasing the styles and energy of the UK’s radical subculture movements, the photos delve through the 70s, 80s and 90s displayed through vintage slide projectors and combined with digital storytelling, journeying through the turbulent political landscape that paved the way for Punk, New Romantics and Rave culture. Celebrating youth culture as an act of resistance and  a direct response to political events.

As part of YOUTH CLUB’s Heritage Lottery Funded project to build an online Museum of Youth Culture, the organisation invites visitors to FORMAT19 to bring their own photographs, flyers and paper ephemera that relate to their upbringing  to the YOUTH CLUB’s scanning socials, taking place during the festival’s Opening Weekend

youthclubarchive.com