An interview with James Blake, Chief Executive of the YHA

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Jonny Gordon-Farleigh: The Youth Hostel Association (YHA) was founded in the early twentieth century with a strong moral and social vision around access to the countryside, young people, and collective self-help. Who were the individuals and organisations that set up YHA, and what kind of organisation was it trying to be at the outset? And looking back, how much have those founding choices – around membership, voluntarism, property ownership, and regional and natural structures – shaped the institution that YHA is today?

James Blake: Youth hostelling started in Germany, just before the First World War, with schoolteacher Richard Schirrmann. In 1909, while taking his pupils on a walking tour during the holidays, they got trapped in a storm and couldn't make it to where they were expected to go. They were relatively near a school, so he decided that they would shelter inside. That gave him the idea to use buildings as facilities for young people to stay in – getting fresh air and exercise while moving freely between places. Interestingly, he never really got that vision off the ground. But Schirrmann also volunteered at a local museum, which received government investment, and Schirrmann ensured that part of that investment involved creating a place where young people could come and stay to experience the heritage and visit the countryside nearby. That became the first youth hostel – basically just a male and a female dorm with bunk beds – and the concept took off, spreading around Europe to Switzerland, Austria, and the Netherlands.

In the UK, people started to travel to the hostels in Germany during the 1920s. The people who were travelling around Europe included some members of the Bloomsbury group, such as John Maynard Keynes; and mountaineer George Mallory – many people connected in different ways around that time, and those ideas were flowing back into literature, history, and education. It was a time in which a whole range of social groups related to outdoor access were set up. This was also a period of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, and there was a sense from the founders of YHA that young people in cities were losing connection with the land and the countryside. In Germany, there were ways in which you could travel and stay affordably, but there were fewer in the UK. Then with the stock market crash in 1929, suddenly people really hadn’t got any money. 

Tom Fairclough, an office clerk from Liverpool, was a key figure in the UK’s hostel movement. Along with a group of friends, Fairclough visited German hostels and found inspiration in these places that allowed people to travel around freely. Back in the UK, he talked to individuals such as T.A. Leonard, who had set up the Holiday Fellowship [now HF Holidays]. At this point, others got the idea and started to set up locally based groups and associations – particularly in Merseyside and Liverpool. In April 1930, a meeting took place at the NCSS offices in London to bring together all of these groups, including the National Union of Teachers, the National Union of Students, the National Association of Boys Clubs, CPRE, and so on. We say that is the official start point of YHA as a national organisation. 

Various establishment figures, many from the Quaker tradition, also got involved. Barclay Baron became the first chair of YHA. He knew Jack Catchpool, who had worked for various organisations, including Toynbee Hall. In the first council, formed in 1930, you had the National Trust, the YMCA, the National Adult School Union, the Workers Travel Association, the Holiday Fellowship, the Countrywide Holiday Association, and the British Youth Council. They were the first organisations associated with the movement. 

What really struck me was that YHA was started as a social reform organisation, not an environmental or countryside conservation organisation... the roots were in fact very much in social reform and young people’s education.

When I first arrived at YHA, we were developing a new strategy, and I had an absolutely fascinating day in the YHA archives in the University of Birmingham. What really struck me was that YHA was started as a social reform organisation, not an environmental or countryside conservation organisation. When I started, most people, particularly older members, told me that YHA was all about countryside conservation, and some felt it had lost touch with its roots. Somehow the historical narrative had shifted, probably in the 1950s, and people had forgotten that the roots were, in fact, very much in social reform and young people’s education. That was really helpful to developing our strategy, and we went back to that founding era to look for inspiration for our social impact and purpose.

The broader point I'm making about membership organisations is that the narrative that's in the communal mind can shift away from what the original purpose was. I think your point about going back to the history is absolutely critical; actually understanding what it was, not necessarily what people say it was.

Where is the next area of growth for the co-operative movement? Is it within advancing industries, such as the tech sector, who often embody co-operative values like openness and democracy? Could the next phase of the movement be about ‘Making Co-ops Cool’ by having Tik-Tok-famous co-operative influencers ? Or is the next step for co-operative innovation held at the grassroots level?

Returning to the disruptive pioneering roots of the movement, a co-operative development body based in Preston, Lancashire, believes they have the next generation of makers, movers, and shakers. Preston Cooperative Development Network (PCDN), set up in 2017 to support the development of co-operatives in and around Preston, has lately turned its focus on empowering artists and women from marginalised communities to begin their own co-operative enterprises through two training programmes: CoLab and Lady Boss. 

The first cohort of the Lady Boss programme, run in early 2025, have since started their own catering enterprise, and are now beginning to incorporate the second cohort into the co-operative. The CoLab group, meanwhile, after visiting the artist co-operative at Northlight Art Studios in Hebden Bridge, were inspired to form their own artist co-operative, and are now in search of a building.

Preston City Council has been supporting the two programmes run by Aysha Patel and Jonny Cosmo through allocation of the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. The Mayor of Preston, Councillor Sue Whittam, has also shown her support by formally awarding each of the programme’s participants with a certificate, the ceremony of which was held in Preston’s newly refurbished Harris Museum, Art Gallery and Library.

The two training programmes aimed to set up local people with the means for starting their own co-operative enterprise. Preston Cooperative Development Network works adjacent to the Preston Model, a civil procurement strategy akin to the shop-local movement, based on Mondragon. Already there are many organisations working to enhance the overall wellbeing of local people. PCDN works closely with social enterprise and grassroots organisations to develop the co-operative economy in the city area. “It’s about being at the heart of communities, and working from the ground up,” says Lady Boss course leader Aysha, who is also founder of Kind Communities CIC and a Barefoot co-operative and community business development advisor.

JGF: Your 1998 book, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, retraces the histories of several countries as they transition from the predominance of private enterprise in essential services such as water, gas, transportation, and housing; the limited regulatory capacity of municipal and national governments; the dominance of laissez-faire ideology; and the reliance on small and fragmented voluntary associations towards an expanded role for the state in social and economic life.

Can you describe the period before the start of the ‘progressive era’?

DTR: You could describe it in three ways. First, it's the age of liberated capital, when capital first breaks loose from the state’s direction. This happens in the UK, in the United States, and across most of the industrialised world. Capital also breaks loose from the mercantile pursuits that were so important in the eighteenth century. It’s the age of industrial capitalism; the factory is the symbol of the new, private, unleashed enterprise. 

It's secondly an age in which a new social utopia comes into being, an idea which we associate with Adam Smith, though he's not the only one who speaks in this way – that the best of all possible worlds is not made by designs from above but by allowing people to pursue their own self-interests. We all know the famous Adam Smith quote: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Self-interest is the key to progress. Setting it loose, we get the best of all practically possible worlds. 

But then thirdly, it's also the age of Charles Dickens, its optimism undercut by a counter-sense that the new social and economic order is cruel, built across an ever-growing chasm between the newly rich and the new urban poor; that it's full of exploitation; that it’s a dystopia of a radically new sort. Dickens had no answer to the nightmares he recognised except kindness. In some ways, those whom we call progressives took that fear and urgency and tried to go beyond kindness.

JGF: How does the nature of the urban poor differ in places like Germany, Britain, and the United States?

DTR: They were all part of a strongly connected social-economic family. The United States in this era was a recipient of massive German, English, Irish, and Scottish immigration. British investment flowed abundantly into American enterprises. In these and other ways, the Atlantic economy was fundamentally transnational. But there were important differences between these three nations. A key distinction in this period was the structure of US law. Starting in the early part of the nineteenth century, American jurists began to invent something they call ‘freedom of contract’ – a constitutional principle of expansive scope and power. When states began to regulate the hours of labour by statute on the British model, American courts overturned most of their work on the grounds that individual workers and their employers must be free to enter employment contracts on whatever terms they choose. On similar grounds, regulation of railroad and public utility rates was much slower to take hold in the US than in Britain or Germany. These and many more like it were court-made decisions, issued with a constitutional authority foreign to other legal systems in the Atlantic world. 

The US state didn't completely withdraw from the social realm. Nor did “progressives” seek to employ the state only for aims we would now call progressive. Many of the people who endeavoured to bring the economy under greater public control were the same people who enforced racial segregation in the US, using the state and its police powers to achieve it. Some of them, like Theodore Roosevelt, were imperialists to the core, as were almost all their analogues in Germany. 

Take a walk through Braunstone, an area woven with social housing on the edge of West Leicester, and you’ll soon spot the neighbourhood’s gathering spaces. 

An award-winning health and social care centre is buzzing with activity; an energy-efficient community hub comes alive with library visitors and adult education classes. You’ll find a well-used foodbank and pantry, and an affordable ‘pre-loved’ second hand shop in a former post office. A cluster of small businesses and social enterprises share a large hub with a dance academy, as kids spill in and out of the football pitch.

None of these arrived through a private developer’s masterplan. The patchwork has been assembled over 25 years by b inspired: a charity and community anchor that stewards a dozen buildings in and around Braunstone. 

Over this time, they’ve gradually transformed derelict or underused assets into a neighbourhood-scale community property portfolio: a web of spaces making local life thriving and affordable, incubating community businesses and reinvesting profits locally. They’ve revived 12 properties, unlocking affordable workspace for 50 small businesses, activities for thousands of residents, and quality, affordable housing for four families. Many of these assets were transferred from the city council or negotiated at below-market sale prices, then painstakingly retrofitted through patient fundraising, each building becoming a catalyst for the next.

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In an area long ranked highly on deprivation indices, b inspired’s story began in the early 2000s with the New Deal for Communities programme. But its longevity comes from the people, like CEO Angie Wright, who refused to let that decade of investment evaporate and worked to reverse the decline signalled by boarded-up shops, empty council buildings, and disappearing local services. As Angie says, “When buildings are neglected, it makes it look and feel like there’s no creativity or potential in the neighbourhood. But there absolutely is.”

This is what it looks like when a community begins to own and shape its own land and buildings for the long term. And it’s not an isolated story…

In London, Stour Trust is acquiring and transforming spaces in gentrifying Hackney, Tower Hamlets, and Southwark, where community organisations are being priced out and long-standing cultural venues evicted overnight. Founder Juliet Can and team have secured multiple virtual freehold leases, including a peppercorn lease of 999 years. That model, says Juliet, “secures affordability for communities in perpetuity, ensuring life-affirming infrastructures continue to exist outside of the market economy.”

Across England, this movement for community asset development is growing. Local leaders are taking on not one, but several, buildings – and turning them into long-term tools for economic justice, social infrastructure and ecological resilience. 

So, what does it take to start the journey from one precarious lease, or no space at all, to a portfolio that transforms a neighbourhood?

‍1/ Build your partnership

The groundwork is relational. Trace back the origin stories of various community property portfolios and what do you find? Conversations. Coalitions. People coming together around at-risk community spaces, threatened venues and new developments. Or sharing experiences of racial and spatial injustice, or local responses to climate and housing pressures. You also find local authorities and developers wanting to do regeneration differently. 

In Darnall Ward in Sheffield, home to a large migrant community, a coalition is taking form. A number of properties have sat empty or underused for years: from an old B&Q to a historic pub, as well as civic spaces. The neighbourhood is shaped by long-term underinvestment, industrial pollution and a critical shortage of social infrastructure. 

“[This is] putting the health of the Global Majority at risk for the economic benefit of people who don’t live locally. I believe these communities are best placed to begin reopening the doors of high street shops and landmark buildings, with local people making decisions,” says Kisha Bradley from Sheffield-born social enterprise Brightbox.  

Brightbox is convening a group of local residents and organisations with experience of spatial injustice to “decentralis[e] power and financial flow”. They’ll co-shape an alternative vision, collaborating with Sheffield City Council and select private asset owners. 

With new core funding from the National Lottery Community Fund (as part of Platform Places’ pilot Local Property Partnerships programme), the group is negotiating its first two buildings and ensuring local underrepresented people have a seat at the table. Kisha says that the funding has been “transformational”: “We’re now able to think and act long-term.”

In Liverpool City Region, Kindred LCR commissioned research from University of Liverpool finding that 70% of the city region’s socially-trading organisations (STOs) cite a lack of secure, affordable space as a key barrier to viability or growth. In response, Kindred has been collectivising: convening STOs and making the case to the Combined Authority to shift funds to this sector. Through the Local Property Partnerships programme and in collaboration with St Helens Metropolitan Borough Council, they’ve secured, and are now activating, the “Street and a Half”: a row of spaces being reimagined with social impact and creative organisations, with a view to a 30-year lease. As Erika Rushton from Kindred puts it, “Clustering STOs means greater impact.”

2/ Secure funds

Even the strongest partnerships need money, and rarely does it arrive all at once. Funding tends to be a story of careful layering, with three broad areas:

• Pre-development costs — to resource a small local team to build partnerships, undertake feasibility studies and develop business models.
• Capital costs — for building acquisition, retrofit and refurbishment.
• Revenue costs — for programming and marketing spaces.

(Visit the ‘Resources’ section of the Platform Places website for examples of funders)

Wandsworth Town Property Partnership began with a £10,000 grant from the local council, followed by £30,000 in further seed funding from Legal & General. By convening stakeholders over a joyful dinner and mapping who owns Wandsworth Town, they started co-creating a new vision and strategy for local regeneration. This early groundwork led to a National Lottery Community Fund grant, alongside Kindred and Brightbox. 

b inspired shows what layered funding can achieve. Over time, their growing portfolio has made them largely self-sufficient, with around 60% of income coming from trading, space hire, and housing, enabling them to offer affordable space to small businesses and avoid hand-to-mouth grant cycles. Their trading company’s surplus flows back into the charity, which owns the buildings.

Getting governance right is vital in order to raise funds and hold the lease or freehold. Legal entity options range from CICs to CIOs to Community Benefit Societies, but a single entity can rarely hold all the risks, assets, and funding streams across multiple properties. Hastings Commons has developed a governance ‘stack’ of four different organisations working in consortium: a social enterprise company limited by shares, a charitable CBS, a registered charity and a subsidiary housing body. Expert advice is important to find the right model(s) for your organisation (look for pro bono support or funding to cover this).

3/ Negotiate your first space 

Bedminster Works in South Bristol (another pilot Local Property Partnership) is mapping and matching a network of spaces with community organisations, enabling feasibility studies and securing high street homes for groups like Share Bristol: Library of Things. They’ve researched local ownership, selected strategic properties, and begun convening public and private landlords through different tactics. James Perrott from Bedminster Works notes that the area is experiencing “significant gentrification pressures", so acting quickly is crucial, “before buildings are lost to mainstream development.”

Planning obligations can help. Stour Trust partnered with a housing developer through a Section 106 (a planning condition requiring developers to contribute to community infrastructure) to secure their 999-year peppercorn lease, double the size of their original space. Wandsworth Town Property Partnership recently agreed a ten-year social value lease with a local developer (a template Heads of Terms is available on the Platform Places website).

At b inspired, the key was not just persuading the council to transfer assets but shaping the terms of that transfer: pushing back on clauses that banned subletting and insisting on longer leases to more easily unlock funding. CEO Angie explains that the process gets easier each time: “Now we’ve got that foundation of trust, councils and funders can see you’re serious.”