Tagging a youth club

There are basically a range of (rather similar) options:

• amenity=community_centre with 'community_centre='youth_centre'
• amenity='youth_club'
• amenity='youth_centre'
• club=youth
• Surprisingly amenity='social_facility' with 'social_facility'='youth_club' does not appear to be used, although in my view this would be appropriate for many run in deprived areas with outreach workers. Various other 'social_facility':* tags allows greater precision.

The former is more widely used, but it's popularity is hard to assess as some of these values are as a result of a remote edit by a single contributor. Personally, I've always been a bit wary of reducing really widespread things like community halls, youth clubs etc to subtags of another tag. My general view is that if something is common it is best supported by a single 'top-level tag. Of course it may be that community_centre, social_facility etc are themselves itself on its way to being a top-level tag in its own right, which would remove my reservations.

I do very much like using amenity=social_facility with the range of other tags for places which are difficult to categorise (secure facilities for difficult children for instance), and this approach still requires use of the amenity key.

No doubt there are some clubs for young people which are more of the nature of pure clubs, and for these the club key will be appropriate. This key can also be used together with the above recommendations.

A note about usage in Britain. Youth clubs are of a wide range of forms: anything from Army Cadets, Young Farmers, through Boys Clubs to modern youth clubs led by trained social workers in deprived areas usually based in a community centre. A single tagging scheme for this range of usage is probably not very sensible. Army Cadets is a bit more than a club for young people, the ones run by professional workers are much more social facilities whereas Young Farmers is clearly a type of club. Classically what is meant by a youth club stems from the Boys & Lads Club movement. When I was a teenager there were many of these around Nottingham, usually with a sports hall, snooker tables, a dry bar and areas for informal socialising. They were run by charities with a membership fee. In many ways they were analogous to working mens clubs but for people under the legal age for drinking. Some still exist, but not being in the target age range I have no idea how popular they are.

Here's one as an example. https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/52.33998/-0.18341