More than 500 visits to the free hub in an empty Rugby Central unit, and officers want it made permanent. The crime figures that will test it are not out yet.
Rugby’s free summer youth hub recorded more than 500 visits in six weeks, and the two officers behind it now want to know whether it can stay.
Warwickshire Police published the figure on 10 September, in its own account of the project’s first summer. The hub ran from the end of July to early September in a unit at Rugby Central that had been empty. It cost young people nothing to use.
“We are now considering whether the hub could become a permanent fixture in Rugby, as well as whether it might work elsewhere in Warwickshire,” PC Rachael Wonfor said in the force’s statement.
What the hub actually was
The force set it out when the hub opened on 24 July. It described the site two ways over the summer, as a previously vacant unit on Market Place opposite Superdrug, and as a unit in Rugby Central Shopping Centre. Both describe the same town centre space.
It opened between two and three days a week across the school holidays, for young people aged 11 and over. The September statement gives the age range as 11 to 18. On offer:
- pool, table football and tennis
- Xbox gaming and virtual reality
- the chance to meet staff from local support services in an informal setting
It was staffed by Rugby Safer Neighbourhood Team officers and Rugby Community Safety Wardens, with partner organisations attending through the summer. Everything inside was free because local businesses paid for it in kind. The force named them: Rugby Central Shopping Centre, McDonalds, Myton Hospice Charity Shop, Asda, Cineworld, Strikes Bar, Tesco and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Centre, which between them donated furniture, games, food vouchers and cinema tickets.
The idea came from PCs Rachael Wonfor and Amie Hextall, working with Rugby Borough Council, Rugby’s Community Safety Partnership and local youth organisations. It followed young people telling officers that the town centre was easy to reach but had little in it for them.
“What started as an idea between Amie and I has become something that’s made a real difference to hundreds of young people across the borough,” PC Wonfor said.
The number that will test it has not been published
The hub’s stated purpose was to reduce youth-related antisocial behaviour. Whether it did is a question the published crime data cannot yet answer, and it is worth being straight about why.
Home Office street-level data lags by about two months. On 13 September the most recent month available from data.police.uk was July 2026. The hub opened on 24 July, so July is effectively a baseline, not a result. August and September, the months that actually contain the hub’s run, have not been released.
Here is the baseline, taken from the force’s own boundary for the Rugby Town Centre neighbourhood rather than a radius drawn on a map.
Antisocial behaviour recorded in that neighbourhood ran at 31 incidents in June 2025 and 25 in July 2025, against 14 in June 2026 and 20 in July 2026. Recorded crime of all kinds in the same area went from 81 in July 2025 to 57 in July 2026.
Across the seven police neighbourhoods that make up Rugby borough, the picture is flat rather than falling. They recorded 175 antisocial behaviour incidents in July 2025 and 181 in July 2026, with all recorded crime up from 755 to 802.
Two cautions apply to any of this. Recorded incidents partly measure how much attention an area is getting, so a project that puts more officers in a town centre can push the count up rather than down. And a police neighbourhood is much bigger than the shopping streets: Rugby Town Centre’s boundary takes in a good deal more than Market Place.
How we got these figures. We took each Rugby neighbourhood boundary from the Warwickshire Police area on data.police.uk and requested the street-level crime inside it for each month named above. Antisocial behaviour is one category within that dataset. Nothing here is modelled or estimated.
What it means for you
The hub is shut, and its future is a decision nobody has taken yet. The force says it is “considering” a permanent version and whether the model would work elsewhere in Warwickshire. No funding, site or date has been announced by anyone.
You can still report antisocial behaviour. Warwickshire Police takes reports online or on 101. Always 999 in an emergency.
It matters where the hub was. The unit sat inside Rugby Central, the shopping centre Rugby Borough Council has committed to seeking control of within two years under its town centre delivery plan. Empty units there are the reason a free youth space could exist at all this summer, and they are also the problem the council is trying to fix. What happens to one affects the other.
Parents looking for the next thing. The council runs its own holiday sport and play programme separately from the police hub, and our things to do in Rugby page lists what is on in the borough.
What to watch
Three markers. Whether August’s street-level crime data, due within weeks, shows anything in the town centre. Whether Rugby Borough Council or the Community Safety Partnership budgets for a permanent hub, which would surface in a Cabinet report rather than a press release. And what happens to the unit itself: the council’s own aim is to fill Rugby Central’s vacancies, which would remove the free space this depended on.
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