Interview with Louisa Robbin

Louisa Robbin

Louisa Robbin is 16, bright, confident, sensible and ambitious. She writes poetry, but sees her future in medicine. She wants to take A-levels in chemistry, psychiatry and English and qualify at university as an anaesthetist.

If she was the daughter of upper-middle-class parents with a Georgian house in Canonbury, say, or Barnsbury, no one would doubt that she could one day become a consultant. A family with the money to send her to a private school, or the ability to play the state system and get her into one of London’s best comprehensives, would have set her up for life, and given the NHS a dedicated public servant.

As it is, her mother is a nurse at University College Hospital who brings up Louisa and her sister by herself in a flat near Southgate Road. Louisa must make the best of Islington’s state system. Recently, she failed to secure a place at an oversubscribed college and she is now concentrating her energies on her second choice.

Not that she is complaining. When I asked if she would swap her home for life in a market town in the Home Counties, she told me that she’s been to the countryside and found it “boring”. She’s proud to be an Islington girl.

But Louisa needs the help her wealthier teenage neighbours take for granted and the Urban Hope youth centre on a Canonbury side street provides it. “It’s a place where you can study and get away from noisy friends,” she says. “It’s quiet and peaceful here.”

The centre is very impressive. Along one wall, stands a row of computers for children without home access to the Internet. The cheerful staff describe how they advise teenagers on everything from CVs to A-level choices. Urban Hope’s other priority is healthy eating. Teenagers practice cooking in the small kitchen and eat together around the communal table. “There’s a great atmosphere here,” says Louisa. “We learn how to cook good food, and nothing says that you are friends more than eating together. It’s a big part of my life.”

Unfortunately in our “Age of Austerity,” Urban Hope is exactly the type of project that struggles to find funds. It doesn’t deal directly with a shrieking social problem such as drug addiction or crime, although its presence keeps teenagers out of trouble. Instead it concentrates on a scandal largely hidden from public view: the waste of London’s talent and the stacking of the odds against social mobility.

“Some of my friends at school are funny, but they mess about and don’t do any work,” Louisa said. “Lots are like me. They want to get on.” To use the old cliché, she needs a hand-up, not a handout, and the way Britain is going it will be up to charitable givers to offer Louisa and Islington teenagers like her the helping hand they need.

Louisa Robbin was interviewed by Nick Cohen, a columnist on the Observer, who lives around the corner from Urban Hope.