The visit led Brown, who has a degree in interior architecture, to the conclusion that young people were not visiting the centre because the building did not meet their needs. So he set up ReDesign Youth, a not-for-profit business dedicated to improving youth centre design.
"They built youth centres in the 1960s and nobody has done anything since," he says. "A lot of these centres now need to be refurbished and there is pressure on the Government to do that. I want to give people a different way of thinking."
The basic principle for Brown, who has a background in social work, is that you should decide what outcomes you want and then build a centre to achieve them. He says many existing clubs are built to a preconditioned idea of what a youth centre should be, and don't meet the needs of today's young.
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