Tucked inside the Frenchgate Shopping Centre, the EPIC Hub offers free drop-in support to teenagers aged 10 to 17 in Doncaster; attendance has surged, anti-social behaviour in the centre has fallen, and the partnership behind it has just picked up a national prize.
The Frenchgate Shopping Centre in central Doncaster is not an obvious setting for a youth intervention programme. But buried inside a unit in the same mall that once saw groups of teenagers regularly calling security and police to attend is a free youth hub that has, by most measurable indicators, been working.
EPIC, which stands for Encouraging Potential and Inspiring Change, opened its Frenchgate base four years ago. Run by City of Doncaster Council and originally established through Doncaster Children’s Services Trust, the hub was funded at the outset by a grant from the South Yorkshire Violence Reduction Unit. It was developed with the involvement of a group of young advisers; the idea being that the young people most likely to use it had a hand in designing what it would look like.
The free-to-use venue is available for those aged between 10 and 17 in the borough. At any given session, it offers a safe place to go for support for around 200 young people every week. The facilities are deliberately low-barrier: the hangout space provides access to a pool table, computers, board games, foosball, table tennis, arts and crafts resources, and gaming consoles, alongside themed activity sessions covering subjects relevant to young people’s lives.
The programme side of the hub goes further than leisure. EPIC’s dedicated team of youth workers deliver a range of sessions from urban street art workshops and spoken word poetry to educational support including work experience, coding workshops, and catch-up learning, as well as sessions on staying safe online and in the community.
Attendance is climbing
The hub’s own figures make a reasonably clear case for its value. The space was frequented 6,206 times in the 2025 calendar year up to the end of September, with 1,024 of those visits occurring during the summer holidays alone. For comparison, there were 647 attendances during the equivalent summer period in 2024, representing 377 more visits year-on-year.
Councillor Sue Farmer, Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Families at City of Doncaster Council, said the hub offers individualised support and gives young people “a safe space when they’re travelling home from school.” She added: “Our young people sometimes get a bad reputation, but if you give them a place like this to call their own, they will prove just how mature, enthusiastic, outgoing and responsible they can be.”
Attendees have been direct about what the space means to them. One 16-year-old girl told the council: “You don’t get many places like this where you can have these conversations with adults without being judged.” A 14-year-old boy described coming with friends to play pool and FIFA, adding that trips out of Doncaster, including paintballing and Ninja Warrior, were highlights of the summer programme.
The Demi story
Perhaps the starkest account of what the hub can represent came in a BBC report published this week. Demi, now 18, describes herself as someone who used to belong to a group of around 50 teenagers causing persistent disruption in the Frenchgate; winding up security and regularly bringing police to the centre. She credits EPIC with changing the direction of her life.
“I think I would have completely ruined my life if I didn’t have EPIC,” she told the BBC. “I think I’d have ended up in a police custody suite.” She is now studying at college. “They actually talk to people, and them treating you like an adult shows you can be a human being and not just think you can cause trouble all the time.”
A national award and a wider model
City of Doncaster Council, South Yorkshire Police, and the Frenchgate Shopping Centre received a national award at the Resolve ASB Awards in February 2026, taking the Best Partnership accolade in recognition of their joint work on youth anti-social behaviour in the Frenchgate.
Rebecca Bryant, CEO of Resolve, said the judges were particularly impressed by “the real-world impact on display: safer spaces, stronger relationships with businesses, and hundreds of meaningful engagements with young people who might otherwise have slipped through the gaps.” She described the project as “a model built on shared intelligence, shared responsibility and shared success.”
The hub forms part of the broader Safer City initiative, through which Doncaster Council and South Yorkshire Police have committed to spending £1 million on new safety measures in the city centre. A dedicated policing base has also opened inside the Frenchgate, allowing neighbourhood officers to work out of the shopping centre during shifts and respond more quickly to incidents.
The EPIC programme also extends beyond the Frenchgate. EPIC Community Outreach workers operate across Doncaster in areas identified by partners as needing additional support, with sessions having run as far out as Thorne and Moorends. EPIC Learning, meanwhile, provides a crime and consequence programme for students aged 11 to 16 who find mainstream schooling difficult to engage with and are at risk of exclusion or have been excluded due to anti-social behaviour, using an experiential learning model that covers core national curriculum subjects alongside real-world learning with local businesses.
The Frenchgate hub’s model; putting a non-judgmental, free resource in the same physical space where trouble was happening rather than somewhere young people would need to travel to; appears to be central to why it has gained traction. Whether that approach can be replicated elsewhere in South Yorkshire, as the Safer City model matures, remains to be seen.