LONDON (AFP) – Ben Wintour looked over the equipment that made up the London outdoor exercise park: pull-up bars, parallel bars, angled benches – all formed out of melted-down knives.
The equipment in each calisthenics park is made from knives provided by London’s Metropolitan Police force: knives that were either surrendered voluntarily or seized in a bid to tackle rising knife crime.
“Our gyms stand as a powerful metaphor… that a negative can be turned into a positive,” he said.
This gym at a park near Brixton, south London, is one of four in the British capital constructed by the ‘Steel Warriors’ charity. Wintour and co-founder Pia Fontes set it up in 2017 to steer young people away from knife crime.
“There’s a lot of awareness around it, but we wanted to understand what the reasons were for young people carrying knives,” Wintour told AFP on a sunny morning at the gym, where around a dozen people were training.
He said a need for self-protection, bravado and a sense of danger walking the streets were prime motivating factors for young people who carried knives.
“We learned that the police take a tonne of knives off London streets every month and we wanted to see if we could take that steel and use it to help young people feel more protected and safe walking the streets.”
Well-meaning campaigns had been effective in raising the issue “but perhaps less effective at changing young people’s behaviour and giving them real solutions”, he explained.
Official figures lay bare the scale of the problem. In London alone, the number of knife or sharp instrument offences recorded by the police rose to more than 15,016 in 2023/24 – from 12,786 in previous year.
A ban on ‘zombie knives’ – long blades with a serrated edge – comes into force in the United Kingdom (UK) recently.
Steel Warriors said it is “sitting on about 10 tonnes of knives” in its warehouse. It has even had to put a pause on taking some knives as they already have too many.
But the gyms they have built were to meet another problem they had identified: the lack of affordable facilities for young people.
He hopes the open-air exercise parks – together with training courses the charity provides for at-risk youths to become personal trainers themselves, will help remedy that.
He also hopes the calisthenics parks will serve as a beacon to the wider communities.
“It’s important not just to focus on the issue and the negative, but also to have some level of hope,” he said.
“We like to think that our gyms stand as quite a powerful metaphor of transformation – not just when it comes to the knives and melting them down and recycling them to into outdoor gyms, but also that a negative can be turned into a positive.
“And there are lots of young people that are going through difficult times, and we can help to transform that as well,” he added.
The first Steel Warriors street gym was located in Poplar, east London. Now there are four of them, with a fifth planned for nearby Stratford. “The ambition and the vision was always really to grow Steel Warriors into something that made a real difference,” said Wintour.
“We’d really like to scale across the UK and we’ve even talked about potentially going global.”
The initiative has high-level endorsements from the likes of champion boxer Anthony Joshua, and financial backers such as Paramount Pictures.
And last week, it unveiled a partnership with UK-based multi-national athletic apparel retailer Gym Shark.
The aim is to make “fitness more accessible and building stronger communities to show that lives should be built on steel, not destroyed by it”, Steel Warriors said in a statement.
That move will help the charity build on its success.
But Wintour has another goal too.
“Sometimes we say our ambition is to fail,” he said. “It would be a great outcome if we have no steel to work with.”
