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Young people should be helped, sheltered, ignored, and clubbed if necessary.

Youth doesn't need friends - it only needs crowds.

Everything has to be organised for kids in London - you can't just walk three roads to see a friend.

I live 50 miles from London and we've got some of the highest levels of teenage and childhood poverty in the country. It's disgusting. Just because it's a rural area, it gets forgotten.

I went through quite a few establishments that maybe weren't great for myself - security units, youth-offender places. I guess that was going to the lions' den. Social services said, 'You've got to go to some sort of school.'

I was 18 when I first visited London, I'm very provincial like that, but I must confess the moment I got to America I thought: This is the place. It was more open, with 24-hour cities and pubs and restaurants that didn't close.

Young adults love to play games and they're thirsty for social interaction, but a lot of bar and restaurant experiences are quite unsatisfactory on the social level. What young people need is a place that has the feel of an unhosted party where they find themselves interacting with like-minded strangers.

Kids need somewhere to go, so they're not bored on the street.

Adolescence is a difficult time at the best of times, and especially in a smaller town - there's all these different energies going on.

So many groups fail because they spend all their time in the clubs. Work pours in and they can't handle it because of late-night drinking.