Making Human
Seen and Heard
When a major institution celebrates youth culture, the question worth asking is not who appeared — but who got to decide what it meant.
Southbank Centre’s You Are Here sounds, on paper, like exactly the sort of thing a major cultural institution ought to be able to do well: a large, ambitious celebration of British youth culture, staged at scale, publicly joyful, outward-facing, properly resourced.[1] The official framing calls it an “epic, one-off pop-culture spectacular,”[2] the centrepiece of Southbank’s 75th anniversary,[3] and a “once-in-a-generation spectacle” created by Danny Boyle, Carson McColl, Gareth Pugh and Paulette Randall, with Sabrina Mahfouz and Natasha Chivers.[4] Guardian coverage adds the theatrical scale: around 1,000 performers, more than 10,000 attendees, and a one-day event built around five “beats” traversing 75 years of youth culture.[5]
And yet a question nags.
Not because older artists should never make work about youth. Of course they can. They should. Youth culture has always travelled through memory, inheritance, admiration, anxiety, imitation and argument. Older people were young once. Some remember clearly. Some work brilliantly across generations. That is not the issue.
The issue is authorship.
When a major institution celebrates youth culture, is it making room for young people’s authorship and agency? Or is it curating youth from above through prestige adult authorship? Publicly, You Are Here is framed through its adult creative leadership.[6] Young people may be present in large numbers — as performers, audience, energy, scale — but young people can be present in a work without being authors of it.[7] Southbank’s own public language does not, at least so far, describe the event as youth-led, youth-curated, or built through an explicit youth co-creation methodology.[8]
This distinction is not mine alone. The British Council’s 2024 review of arts, culture and young people defines co-creation and co-design as practice in which young people are trusted to make decisions about how work should be structured, with professionals acting as enablers rather than sole authors.[9] NPC’s review of how to engage more young people in arts and culture reaches a similar conclusion, arguing that good practice depends not just on welcoming young people in, but on involving them in decisions.[10] ART31 puts it more bluntly: arts providers need authentic youth engagement and youth leadership opportunities, and those opportunities must not be tokenistic.[11]
In other words, the language of culture is full of words that sound democratic and feel warm — youth-centred, youth-powered, co-created, participatory, inclusive — but they do not all mean the same thing. A work can be about youth without being shaped by young people. It can involve young people without handing them decision-making power. It can consult them without changing because of them. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child gives a rights-based floor to this: young people’s views should be expressed freely and given due weight.[12] Hart’s classic ladder of participation distinguishes token presence from shared decisions.[13] The Lundy model pushes the point further: voice on its own is insufficient unless it has audience and influence.[14]
This is what makes Southbank such an interesting case. Because this is not a simple story of a grand old institution clumsily trying to look trendy. Southbank has, by its own account, done real work in this space. Its Youth Collective is explicitly described as part of its commitment to young people; members are invited to play “a key role in co-designing and informing the delivery” of the wider youth programme,[15] and the offer includes the practical infrastructure that usually separates serious participation from symbolic invitation — vouchers, meals, travel bursaries.[16] Its wider arts-and-wellbeing programme is also aimed at young people aged 11 to 25.[17]
Southbank’s wider youth-facing programming supports that reading. Its recently announced Letters To The Future weekender is explicitly billed as a “youth-powered” event[18] that will “turn the spotlight on the voices of the generation shaping our future.”[19] (Even the word “letters” hints at the same question: who is choosing the frame?) The prestige logic does not disappear — the programme is still framed through “internationally renowned” figures and guest curators[20] — but the institution is at least publicly trying to describe youth perspective as something more than decorative relevance.
That, in turn, sharpens the flagship question rather than softening it. If an institution knows the vocabulary of co-design, knows how to build youth-facing structures, and knows how to describe shared influence when it wants to, then the absence of that language at the centre of its biggest youth-culture statement becomes legible. The question becomes: what is Southbank trying to claim about itself through You Are Here? Not only what is it staging, but what is it saying about its own role in culture, memory and national identity? The anniversary programme frames You Are Here not merely as an event but as part of a larger statement about what Southbank has been, is, and will be.[21]
The public framing suggests something larger than celebration. This is a journey through 75 years of youth and social movements, remixed and gathered into a single institutional statement.[22] It says, in effect: we can hold this history; we can select it, sequence it, and show it back to the public as a national story. That may be generous, imaginative and alive. It may also remain top-down. A national repertoire of youth culture is still a repertoire. Somebody chooses what goes in, what gets foregrounded, and what kind of energy can survive monument-scale curation.[23]
Youth culture has another history too. Not only the history that gets curated, but the history that happens to institutions before institutions know what to do with it. The Southbank Undercroft is the obvious local example. That was youth culture from below: not programmed, not commissioned, not neatly authored in advance, but collectively made through use, repetition, argument, risk and presence. The later campaign to save it was never just about keeping a skate space open. Reporting on the 2014 settlement captured the public conflict over whether the space would remain open and free.[24] Heritage scholarship on the Undercroft goes further, arguing that its value lay in being a “found space” shaped by embodied practice and “citizen expertise,” something whose meaning could not simply be relocated and reproduced elsewhere by institutional design.[25]
That contrast helps. One model begins with the institution and asks how youth can appear inside it. The other begins with youth practice and asks what the institution must concede in order to live alongside it.
I suspect that what we are seeing in You Are Here is not bad faith so much as commissioning logic. Prestige institutions often default to established adult auteurs when they want scale, legitimacy and visibility.[26] That is not necessarily because they distrust young people. It is because recognisable authorship stabilises the story. A famous name helps the institution explain the event to funders, press, stakeholders and audiences. It helps manage risk. It makes a sprawling proposition legible. The old “star curator” problem has been named before: the Pew Center’s Curating Now notes how institutions can become organised around recognisable authorship in ways that suppress other voices.[27] Reporting on blockbuster dynamics in public cultural institutions has shown how funding and visibility pressures can narrow who gets the biggest platform.[28]
That logic has consequences. It can produce a familiar division of labour. Young people are invited to be abundant — performers, atmosphere, currentness, the body of the event. Adults retain interpretive control. The institution is happy to stage youth, but less structurally willing to surrender authorship to it.
There are alternatives. Some institutions say this plainly when they mean it. BFI Southbank has used the language “conceived, curated and hosted by young people” for its Rip It Up programme.[29] The Barbican’s Young Film Programmers scheme says participants “curate, market, and deliver” the Chronic Youth Film Festival and determine its themes and programme.[30] Tate’s Producers programme is framed, in both sector reporting and practice case studies, around young people curating projects and events, devising workshops and festivals, and being given real responsibility through handed-over decision-making.[31]
None of these models is utopian. All still sit inside institutional scaffolding. But they show what explicit authorship can look like when an institution is prepared to name it.
That is why the central question here is not whether Danny Boyle should have been invited to make something large and ambitious. He is a serious artist. The difficulty is not that an older artist has touched youth culture. The difficulty is what happens when the biggest canvas still defaults upward.
There are many people in this country who spend their working lives making difficult, imaginative, deeply collaborative work with young people. They are good at it — more than good: it is their practice, their craft, their politics, their discipline. The British Council’s youth arts review, the Cultural Learning Alliance’s work on shaping creative futures with young people at the centre, and the Centre for Cultural Value’s example of youth researchers designing their own study all point in the same direction: giving young people genuine influence changes not just tone, but structure, knowledge and outcomes.[32] Yet those methods rarely seem to receive the flagship institutional canvas. Institutions are often willing to fund youth voice as a strand, a programme, a lab, a collective, a side-room of good practice. They are less willing to make it the organising principle of the main stage.[33]
This is not only an internal arts-sector issue. British Council research on Next Generation UK 2024 found that young people in the UK place a high value on arts and culture, but that participation still shows a socioeconomic divide.[34] Once you see that, the question of who gets to define youth culture publicly stops looking cosmetic. It becomes part of the broader question of who is allowed to shape the national story, and from where.
Years ago, I helped start a youth theatre project called Seen and Heard. The title did one small but important thing: it removed the “not” from the old injunction that children should be seen and not heard. That still feels like the right test. Institutions are often perfectly comfortable letting young people be seen. The harder question is whether they are being heard — not as decorative proof of relevance, but as people with the power to shape meaning, set terms and author part of what the culture becomes.
If Southbank wants You Are Here to stand as a statement about youth culture now, then that is the question it will eventually have to answer: not only who appeared, not only who attended, not only who was celebrated, but who got to decide what youth culture meant.
Keep Making Human
References
[1] Southbank Centre, You Are Here event page.
[2] Southbank Centre, You Are Here publicity describing it as an “epic, one-off pop-culture spectacular.”
[3] Southbank Centre, 75th anniversary programme page.
[4] Southbank Centre press release, “The Southbank Centre unveils You Are Here … celebrating and remixing 75 years of pioneering British culture,” 2026.
[5] Caroline Davies, The Guardian, 2 April 2026.
[6] You Are Here credit line as publicly listed by Southbank Centre.
[7] Core framing developed in the author’s research notes.
[8] Public materials do not describe the work as youth-led or underpinned by explicit youth co-creation methodology.
[9] British Council, UK Arts, Culture and Young People: Innovative Practice and Trends, 2024.
[10] NPC / Mohn Westlake Foundation, How Can We Engage More Young People in Arts and Culture?, 2019.
[11] ART31 / Arts Council England, Young People and Arts Engagement.
[12] OHCHR, Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 12.
[13] Roger A. Hart, Children’s Participation: From Tokenism to Citizenship, UNICEF, 1992.
[14] European Commission, The Lundy Model of Child Participation, 2022.
[15] Southbank Centre, Youth Collective page.
[16] Southbank Centre, Youth Collective participation support details.
[17] Southbank Centre, arts-and-wellbeing / youth programme materials for ages 11–25.
[18] Southbank Centre press release, “Letters To The Future,” 2026.
[19] Southbank Centre publicity describing Letters To The Future as spotlighting the next generation’s voices.
[20] Letters To The Future programme framing, Southbank Centre, 2026.
[21] Southbank Centre, press release: “The Southbank Centre unveils 75th anniversary programme,” 2025.
[22] Southbank Centre, You Are Here event description.
[23] Author’s analysis.
[24] “Skaters will stay at the undercroft as London’s Southbank Centre gives in,” The Guardian, 18 September 2014.
[25] Rebecca Madgin, David Webb, Pollyanna Ruiz and Tim Snelson, “Resisting relocation and reconceptualising authenticity: the experiential and emotional values of the Southbank Undercroft, London, UK,” International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2018.
[26] Author’s analysis.
[27] Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Curating Now: Imaginative Practice / Public Responsibility, 2010.
[28] “Blockbuster shows ‘limit chances for minority artists’,” The Guardian, 26 January 2020.
[29] BFI Southbank, Rip It Up page.
[30] Barbican, Young Film Programmers / Chronic Youth Film Festival materials.
[31] Museums + Heritage on Tate Collective Producers; Engage, “Young People as Co-Producers: One Collective’s Journey.”
[32] British Council, UK Arts, Culture and Young People; Cultural Learning Alliance, “Shaping creative futures with young people at the centre”; Centre for Cultural Value, “Empowering Youth Researchers.”
[33] Author’s analysis.
[34] British Council, Next Generation UK 2024.