Eleven sessions a week, five of them free.

Doors open at 6.30pm. Between thirty and sixty young people arrive across the first hour, mostly in twos and threes, mostly without saying anything to anyone on the way in. The pool table is claimed within about ninety seconds. By seven the kitchen hatch is open and there is a queue for whatever has been cooked — on a good Tuesday that is something one of the seniors has made themselves, on a bad one it is beans and toast, and either way it is the only hot meal some of them will have that day. Two youth workers are on the floor rather than behind a desk, because a desk is a thing young people have to approach and a pool table is not. Somewhere between eight and half past, three or four conversations happen that are the actual reason the building is open: about a bereavement, a court date, a set of results, a parent who has started drinking again. Nobody books those conversations. They happen because an adult who is not paid to assess anyone, and who is not going to ring the school in the morning unless they have said they will, has been in the same room for four years. At nine the music goes off, the chairs go up, and six or seven of them stay behind to help stack because they always do. That is the whole model. It is not complicated and it does not scale, and both of those things are the point.

The timetable above is term-time. In the school holidays we drop to three days a week — Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, same times — and run a holiday club at Easter and through August at £14 a day or £60 a week, free to families eligible for Holiday Activities and Food funding. That funding is applied for by us, not by you; ask at the desk and we will do the form. We close for two weeks over Christmas and on bank holidays, and we post the exact dates on the noticeboard by the Hopwood Lane door and in the termly bulletin six weeks ahead. Two things people are caught out by, so they are worth saying plainly. First, Friday Late finishes at 10pm and we do not let under-16s leave alone after 9pm unless a parent or carer has told us that is the arrangement — one phone call sorts it for the year. Second, the Bike Workshop and Bronze DofE both run in fixed blocks with a start date, so unlike everything else here you cannot join those halfway through; the next intake dates are always on the noticeboard, and if you have missed one we will put your name down for the next.