Ramsgate's last youth centre finds a future after grassroots campaign

Pie Factory Music, a charity that's spent 13 years running the only dedicated youth centre left in Ramsgate, will keep its doors open. After a campaign that started in September 2024, the organisation has secured the freehold to the building — a win that feels particularly significant in a coastal town where young people face some of the country's steepest challenges.

The centre nearly went to auction. In November 2025, the Guardian revealed that Kent county council was planning to sell the building, despite an independent report showing it was saving the council more than £500,000 annually through mental health support, youth justice work, and social care services that might otherwise fall to the state. The maths were clear. The need was obvious. The building was still on the market.

What tipped the balance was a £535,000 grant from the government's Pride in Place strategy, designed to funnel investment into England's most deprived communities. For Zoë Carassik, Pie's chief executive, the outcome brought something that's become rare in youth services: certainty. "Knowing our future in the building is secure fills us with hope and relief," she said.

But Carassik was careful not to frame this as a happy ending so much as a warning. "We should never have had to campaign to save Ramsgate youth centre in the first place," she said. The real issue isn't one saved building — it's the landscape that made saving it necessary.

The wider picture

Youth services in England have contracted sharply. Between 2010 and 2024, funding fell by 73%, according to a 2025 YMCA report. Wales saw a 6% year-on-year decline over the same period. Young people in deprived coastal areas, research shows, are three times more likely to be living with an undiagnosed mental health condition than their inland peers. The lack of dedicated spaces where young people can access counselling, employment advice, life skills, or simply exist somewhere safe has become a defining gap in these communities.

Pie Factory itself is a window into what that gap looks like when it's filled. For eight- to 25-year-olds in Ramsgate, the centre offers counselling, employment guidance, creative and music projects, and specific support for young refugees. It's not a luxury amenity. It's infrastructure for adolescence in a place where infrastructure is thin.

Carassik's plea now is for the government's newly announced Youth Matters national strategy to come with real, sustained funding rather than rhetoric. She's also calling for statutory protections for youth services — a way to prevent councils from treating them as the first thing to cut when budgets tighten.

Brian Horton, interim chair of the Ramsgate Neighbourhood Board, which approved the grant, put it plainly: "The board is making a clear statement: we are committed to providing safe, positive spaces for the next generations to thrive." One building saved. The question now is whether that statement becomes policy.