‘If you hear your town is scum all the time that sinks in’: the young people in Blackpool refusing to be written off | Blackpool
MIkeel knows exactly how he feels about his hometown city Blackpool. “It is just great,” he says. He walks along the last seashore, they have sunlight on seats and children playing in the sand that the Blackpool Tower ignores, and he throws his arms with a huge smile. “For me, it was a great place to grow. I don’t understand why anyone will speak in his city. If you feel upset about your city, you will feel out of yourself, right?”
Michael’s life may be in places-he studies fashion in college, makes music and has a part-time work for visitors in Sea Life Aquarium-but he knows that his positivity towards Blackpool is not shared by his peers in the city.
He says that life for many young people here is difficult, for an countless number of complex and interfering causes; Bad housing, weak educational opportunities, employment, infrastructure and insufficient transportation.
Although BlackPool has become one of the “Trailblazer” neighborhoods in the United Kingdom It has been called a review of the government’s spending and promised up to 20 million pounds to invest over the next decade, and it is possible that the proposed luxury cuts will hit the city’s youth crisis in the city strongly.
Looking at all this, the last result of the University of Esix Young people in coastal cities are three times more likely You have more unbalanced mental health than anywhere else in England and does not surprise him.
He says: “There are many people of my life here just stumble in this session of feeling that they do not go anywhere, and there is nothing here.” “The more the media comes here, they just want to write about the bad things that make this entire session get worse.”
Blackpool began to rise through many denial indicators In England and Wales a decade ago – with all the total measures at the local authority level that shows that Blackpool had become relatively more deprived since 2007 – and what Cambridge University paper described as “frequent media Standard for coastal deprivation. “
Question and answer
What is against the tide chain?
Display
Over the next year, a project against the Tide of the Seascape’s Guardian will report the lives of youth in coastal societies throughout England and Wales.
Young people in many coastal cities in England are likely to face poverty, poor housing, low educational attainment and employment opportunities from their peers in the equivalent interior. In the most deprived coastal cities, they can be left for the struggle through collapse and the abstraction of public services and transportation systems that limit their choices of their lives.
Over the next 12 months, with documentary photographer Polly Pradin, we will travel up and down to the country to the cities of the port, coastal resorts and former hunting villages to ask 16 to 25 years to tell us about their lives and how they feel the places where they live.
By placing their voices at the front and amids our reports, we want to check the type of changes they need to build future contracts they want for themselves.
Over the past few years, local and national media have focused almost exclusively on BlackPool through the lens of poverty and deprivation statistics. Newspapers like one of Express last year that compared Blackpool to Beirut where “Children’s Street” Barefoot “next to me” What some groups with young people consider “porn of poverty”.
Others believe that this description of their city is an unavoidable condemnation of the stigma and shame for young people who are already struggling to feel satisfied with their horizons.
“If you only hear that your mother town is a scum throughout the time you are drowning,” Michael says.
“What makes me angry is that it is not true that everything is bad here for people. There are a lot of good things that happen here but no one tells these stories. Everyone really feels urinating when the media talks about how bad they are in Blackpool, but it seems that there are not many people helping us to be proud of where we are.”
Michael says that his pride and faith himself thanks to his mother, who raised him alone and saw that his creativity was a key to building his confidence.
He also says that he will not become the person who is now if he does not find his community in House of Wingz, a “art house” founded by the couple Sam and what Bill Durashti.
It was launched as a dance company in 2006, and House of Wingz has evolved into a youth and street center. It was placed on a back street that is not far from the waterfront, as it became a second home for Michael and hundreds of others from the city.
In addition to the large dance studio, there is a music studio and skiing slope. Someone prepared a coating angle with oil panels and stacked on the wall. The place wanders with the dance of hip -hop dance in the movement and adolescents who are scattered up and down in the ski stairs.
-
The clockwise direction from the top of the left: Michael passes through some dance moves in the Winjz house. Orson, who has been taking dance lessons since he was eight years old; Joe, who loves to surround himself with “positive people” and making music; Julia, who learned to dance at House of Wingz and now took her own workshops
“Basically, anything creative we want to do, Sam and Ashi will achieve it,” Michael says. His mother took him for the first time there when he was eight -year -old dance lessons in the streets. “They are always like,” just search for your passion and go to it. “You don’t need to be the best dancer or the best in anything, it is good to be here and have a good normal life.”
Orson, 22, in the kitchen, cools after a dance lesson. He grew up in one family in Blackpool with three siblings, and his mother saw struggling to pay the bills.
He says: “I know what is like living in bad housing, and it is shy.” “Housing is a really big problem for young people here. You can only feel bad about your life if you live like this. I hated the school, you have really difficult time, but then I found dance and found this place and changed my life.”
Urson has been taking lessons in House of Wingz since he was eight years old and is now a talented dancer. “Maybe I spent thousands of hours here,” he says.
He is now studying and about to go on a tour with his dance company. He has no problem talking about how he makes him feel. “This makes me feel life, like, really good about myself,” he says. “It is an example [I have] This confidence when I am in a room and there is music, I just have this vision for what I can do with my body, and how I can make something great, strange or what I want. You come out of here and believe in yourself. “
Many talk here about how House of Wingz finds them out of depression or taught them the skills that opened new paths. For 23 -year -old Julia, who moved to Blackpool from Poland and initially struggled with isolation, “I brought all these wonderful people in my life. I learned to be a dancer of nothing, and now I am studying dance and going to schools and running in workshops. She does not know many people.
Joe says that he had confidence in believing himself and his music. “Finding this society means a lot, just surrounding the positive people, making music and doing fruitful things with your time. My life was not easy, I grew up in the wrong area, but that did not prevent me from trying to chase my dreams.”
He sits abroad under the afternoon sunlight, Sam and what Bill Dotti says they know that what they present will not fix the major methodological problems in the lives of young people.
-
Sam and what Bill Dotti, who delivers the home of Winjz, works hard to involve young people in the conversation about the future of Blackpool
“Life is very difficult for many children here, many of them have nothing at all and they can face multiple defects, but they also carry this negative view of what they can do in their lives,” says Aish. “It is very difficult to change this perspective or mental because it is a generation.”
According to the National Statistics Office, 28 % of the Blackpool population was ranked as “economically inactive” Last year – do not work or search for work. “Many young people in Blackpool, and adults in their lives do not do anything, accommodate, expose all of this to their lives, and feel despair,” said Aish.
AISH and Sam wants to get House of Wingz members such as Michael, Orson, Joe and Julia to be part of the conversation about what young people need in Blackpool so that they can feel satisfied with the city and their future in it.
They run a program for the House of Wingz youth who gets older members of their community to teach dance for hundreds of young children, who says Aish. Michael, Orson, Joe and Julia in a guidance committee with local policy makers to develop a new strategy for the arts and culture of Blackpool.
“The problem is that all optics are wrong. You need to show young people that there are people in the city who create things and their inspiration. This is how ambition grows,” says Aish. “Young people often do not need to get out of BlackPool, but they must find the appropriate opportunities or paths here but their voices are not listened to enough – the future of this city.”
-
Orson on Blackpool Beach. A talented dancer, he says dance “makes me feel life, like, really good for myself”
