Reflections on a life of radical thinking

Apart from the aggressively un-academic title (the subtitle was Growing Up in the Working-Class City), the book was a curious mix of a story of youth work and a radical Marxist critique of the youth condition. Its authors were Dave Robins and Phil Cohen. Phil Cohen is probably the better-known name, for he subsequently pursued a career as a radical academic in youth studies. Dave Robins' name may be less well known, yet he had an equally significant, if rather more varied, career.

Dave died last month of cancer at the age of 62. His legacy is a powerful mark on youth studies and the analysis of youth initiatives. Before I ever knew him (we met in 1978) he had been a journalist on radical, and legendary, "underground" papers such as Time Out and International Times. After Knuckle Sandwich, he produced a surprising report on the role of sport in youth crime prevention, challenging its efficacy but noting that the primary "youth workers" in the delivery of such practice were in fact the police. Dave then published We Hate Humans, an account of football hooliganism, which I slated in a review. I then discovered that one of the people mentioned in the book was the secretary of the football club for which I played at the time.

In the early 1990s, Dave wrote Tarnished Vision: Crime and Conflict in the Inner City, a superb account of a multi-million pound public sector community initiative that went dramatically wrong. I still wonder how many, or how few, people made the connection between Robins' anonymised story of disaster and the gushing public relations around the project produced by a major national charity with royal patronage: you would never believe that they could be related to the same initiative.

I renewed contact with Dave only a couple of years ago and we traded more recent publications. He sent me Cool Rules (co-authored with Dick Pountain), another fascinating book concerned with the history and meaning of "cool".Dave's interest had been inspired by the use of the term by his teenage children.

For some years Dave had been a good version of poacher turned gamekeeper, distributing resources for youth work as director of a charity. But he never lost his critical edge and his critical mind. Not so long ago he wrote a piece for a national newspaper, entitled "What ever happened to the inner-city?" His eclecticism was distinctive and influential and he will be sorely missed.

- Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of Glamorgan, and a member of the Youth Justice Board Email howard.williamson@haymarket.com.