LONDON — 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 ton 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 UK Tuesday.
