The Kids Are Alright

It was the summer of 2013 that my friend Jordan broke his wrist. Despite wearing a purple cast for the entire school holidays, he still managed to roll our cigarettes for us whilst we giggled and ate Rainbow Drops in the disused Ravenhead Glass bottle factory on the edge of the town centre. Four towering floors of concrete and fibreglass, it was a maze of hazardous corridors and graffiti. But to a teenager, it was a remote paradise.

It wasn’t just the glass factory that caught our attention, but also the abandoned train tracks by the big Tesco (we called them The Tracks). If it was raining we would sit under the car park – affectionately named Hobo – listen to Paramore and take pictures for Instagram. We were happy to be out of sight and mind, hidden in the corners of the eyesores that nobody wanted to look at.

Despite my hometown of St Helens consistently landing itself in the top 10 most depressing towns in Britain, my experience growing up there was much different. The parts of town that were hated by the adults were embraced by the youth. The empty factories were stark shadows of the industrial heyday of the town, and reflected the grim reality of the present: underinvestment and disrepair. Yet, they were the only spaces where we were able to feel free from the same condemnation; wind in my face, drinking Monster Energy, listening to whatever music I liked whilst watching my friends do kickflips off fallen pieces of plasterboard. 

Police repeatedly issued warnings about visiting the old factories, sometimes they’d even turn up and kick us out without offering an alternative hangout. To be fair, they were distracted. This was the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the town’s glory days firmly placed in the rearview mirror. Adults wanted a Primark and the kids just wanted peace and quiet – to be allowed to love where we lived, not urged to find a way out.

Nowadays, when I tell people I’m from St Helens, I often have to issue an immediate addendum of “Oh yeah, it’s in between Liverpool and Manchester,” to which people’s eyes light up and suddenly a stream of Oasis, The Hacienda, and The Beatles starts pouring out their mouths. I love that people relate the region where I grew up to such displays of creativity and counterculture. But to many, the halcyon days of tie-dye and bucket hats are over. The kids who wagged school to jump over the fence at Spike Island have grown up and now they wear Stone Island. They pay thousands of pounds for Oasis tickets. They don’t make music like that anymore, or so they say, as they turn up Radio X. There’s nothing wrong with growing up. We’ve all got to do it some day. But to deny today’s kids a cultural identity because it wouldn’t look good on the cover of NME is sad.

When bored North West teenagers had a party in the woods during lockdown, it caused outrage. Penny* is a twenty-something from the North West. Like many of her counterparts, her weekends are spent in the pub, or dressed to the nines on the cobbles of Concert Square. Her eyes twinkle beneath thick Russian lashes as she tells me about her experience at the infamous Hidden Dimension forest rave in Kirkby. She described it as “all about peace and love”, and recalled how bored she felt sitting at home all day at the beginning of lockdown in 2020. That boredom soon turned into frustration: “They [couldn’t] stop us from going out and enjoying our lives.” Penny says that they “were all just there to have fun”. She tells me that people put their differences aside in pursuit of a good time: “There were people dancing together who had been having beef for years… everyone just wanted to go out and have a party.”

^* name changed to protect identity

The hedonistic attitudes of both my abandoned escapades and the illegal ravers of lockdown echoes those of the members of the free party movements of the 90s. Despite almost 30 years passing, the circumstances are not that different. As music journalist Simon Reynolds asked in The Wire back in 92: “What’s left but to zone out, to go with the flow, to disappear?” After over a decade of single-party rule and change nowhere in sight, we’re still up to our disappearing act.

For the aesthetes, the North West may no longer be fertile ground for vibrant displays of creative counterculture to flourish in the kaleidoscopic, highly documentable way that it did in the 20th century, but don’t do the kids of today a disservice. The kids are doing just fine and they are having a lot of fun – they just make sure you don’t know about it, lest you shut them down.

all photographs courtesy of the author