Hackney Council has been awarded £5m through the government’s myplace programme to create five new youth centres for young people in the borough. There will be a flagship centre built at Forest Road (the hub) and four neighbourhood centres (the spokes), which will be created through radically transforming three existing facilities and building an additional new centre at Woodberry Grove. Each centre will have an associated specialism (eg sport, IT, special needs, arts).

The aim of the myplace programmes is to create world-class places that will offer young people the widest possible range of high-quality activities and co-located support services

Young people have been put in the lead to plan and deliver dedicated youth projects driven by their views and needs.

The overarching aims of the myplace programme in Hackney, defined by members of the Myplace Participation Group are:

• To get young people off street corners and into clubs
• To change the negative perceptions that people have of Hackney and young people within the borough
• Achieve a mindshift in young people: to convince them there’s more than one path in life.

Myplace in Hackney needs a brand

The myplace centres have been publicised to date under the working title of Hackney Hubbz. There are issues with this as a brand, however, in its associations with street culture, which may be a barrier to involving all young people in the borough, and in a practical sense that there is only one Hub, and four spokes, so the brand is misleading.

In creating a new name and a new logo for the myplace centres, we need to communicate a set of values that young people, parents/carers and professionals will associate with the brand. These include:

• Modernity, something that is new and exciting, a break from the past
• Safety – young people feel comfortable travelling to and inside the centres
• Ownership: a brand for young people in Hackney. Young people in the borough will contribute to: the look and feel of the brand; the design of the centres; how they are run; and in the commissioning of services
• Inclusion: myplace centres are for all young people in Hackney