“Round here we’ve got Third Set, in Shepherd’s Bush you have 12 Anti who are currently beefing Third Set. 12 World are beefing 12 Anti. Then you get in to Ladbroke Grove and you got Ten Eleven. Then you’ve got Mozart.”

This is just one corner of a bewildering jigsaw of gang rivalries in west London, described by Colin Brent, a youth worker at the Bollo Brook youth centre in south Acton. “You can have Acton beefing Acton, Bush beefing Bush. Bush beefing Acton. Young people don’t even know whose side they’re supposed to be on any more.”

Driven by the drugs trade and simple animosity and amplified by social media, similar tensions are replicated across Britain’s towns and cities where youth knife crime has been rising sharply.

Knife crime convictions among 10-to-17-year-olds have surged by 51% since 2014 in England and Wales with the steepest rises in the West Midlands and the east of England. The number of under-18s admitted to accident and emergency units with stab wounds across England rose 76% over the same period to 566 in 2017-18, according to NHS tallies. Eleven teens have been stabbed to death in England already this year.

Today in Focus Growing up with gangs, poverty and knife crime - podcast Sorry your browser does not support audio - but you can download here and listen https://audio.guim.co.uk/2019/03/15-74390-190318_TIF_youthclub.mp3 00:00:00 00:31:57

Leon and Ayanna, 18-year-old friends, have seen enough of this to know they want out. Ayub Hassan, a 17-year-old who attended the Bollo with them, was that 11th child fatality. He was so slight he was nicknamed “X-Ray” and had been stabbed twice before. His family said he wanted to be a barrister. A 15-year-old boy has been charged with his murder.

“Thing is about Ayub,” said Leon, “that could have been me or one of my friends. He was a normal kid.”

Leon is growing up poor in west London. He has seen three people stabbed, associates with gang members and is always on alert for possible attack. Ayanna has been excluded from schools four times. Her ex-boyfriend often strapped a knife to his leg and wore a stab vest, and at 18 she found herself homeless, sleeping on buses. Ayanna behaved badly at school and ended up in a special unit, but because it was controlled and focused on her, she finally knuckled down and got six GCSEs including an A in philosophy and ethics.

They are thoughtful, vulnerable and angry, and over the last four months the Guardian has spent time with them listening to their views. Amid a national debate focused on boosting police numbers and increasing stop and search, they instinctively reach deeper into the roots of the crisis.

They highlight school exclusions, poor education, inflammatory social media, the lack of decent jobs, youth service cuts and racism. But one theme keeps recurring: the struggle for space and territory, at home or on the streets, and the corrosive effect of its absence.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘So then you don’t have space at home ... You’re going to feel like you belong outside on the street right?’ Photograph: Teri Pengilley/The Guardian

“Overcrowding is from poverty,” said Leon. “You don’t have enough money to get a bigger house. It’s not that violence is there for the sake of violence. People are being violent because they are pushed there.”

It is not unusual for children at the Bollo to come from eight-person households squeezed into a two-bedroom flat. Ayana lived in overcrowded conditions with her mother, younger brother and boyfriend. She would want to eat after college, but her mum would be asleep in the living room, having worked at night. Her brother would sleep with her mum, so her mum couldn’t get a boyfriend. Tensions mounted until she had to leave.

“You don’t have space at home so you go to the Bollo, but they’re trying to make youth clubs smaller,” she said. “So then you don’t have space at home, you don’t have space there. What are you going to turn to? You’re going to feel like you belong outside on the street, right?”

Ealing’s youth service budget has fallen from £1.9m to £0.8m. It has just been moved into premises half the size to make way for a housing regeneration.

Street friends become family substitutes and once in and around gang “families”, “you’re willing to fight for it”, Ayanna said.

After sleeping on buses and a friend’s sofa, she now lives in a hostel, where tension over space remains. She was recently beaten up in her room by three other girls motivated in part by the fact her place was slightly larger than theirs.

Her life would be different “if I was middle class” and her family had more rooms, and could eat, sleep and work better, she reasons.

Experts in child violence increasingly believe domestic circumstances matter. In Islington, where Nedim Bilgin, 17, was stabbed to death in January, council officials have assessed the common factors among the borough’s 25 most prolific violent young offenders. Witnessing or being a victim of domestic violence, being detached from parents and being excluded from mainstream education were the most common factors.

Once out on the streets, “beef” makes life dangerous, said Leon. Caused by competition over drug dealing patches or perceived slights, it is often exacerbated by cannabis-caused paranoia.

“[Customers] have got so many options of people to call, it comes down to quality,” he said. “So now its competitive. Now you’re needing to up your game or you just choose the other option and take people out.” He once saw a dealer operating on a rival’s corner slashed across the face.

One day “it was like a war”: “I saw a guy with a MAC-10 [submachine gun] running from the feds [police]”.

The stress of the streets is exhausting and can be so great that “a lot of people see prison as an escape… [because] you’re not going to get shot there”.

“I’ve had people tell me if I go there at least I will have somewhere to sleep and three meals to eat,” said Ayanna. “Exercise, get to focus on the gym. It’s a bloody leisure centre.”

Any perception that you are affiliated to a rival gang is dangerous and often for dizzying reasons. She explains how her ex-boyfriend is from area A and her hostel neighbour is from area B. The gang in area A is in alliance with a gang from area C. Gang C don’t get along with gang B. So Ayanna has to be careful not to be heard listening to music made by gang C because that could make her a target for her neighbour who “reps” for area B.

“Things do escalate quickly,” said Leon. “Nobody wants to seem like a bitch [coward] especially with social media, because someone would [post], ‘Oh, you had your shank and you didn’t stab me. You’re wet.’”

Brent said many of the people at his youth club simply cannot see a long term future for themselves.

“A lot of the young people we work with have seen their parents on crap wages for 20, 30 years and struggle to get by,” he said. “[They] don’t want to go into a minimum wage job for the next 40 years and be a slave to the system. But they don’t see an alternative. And so they get involved in drugs and in gangs; alternative systems of power where they can be powerful.”

It chimes with the experience in Islington of Cllr Joe Caluori, who was in charge of children’s services in for six years and dealt with multiple killings.

“Youth violence is a function of poverty and lack of aspiration,” he said. “We need to give them a clear line of sight to a job with cash in their hands.”

For Leon and Ayanna, the staff at the youth club are “like our parents” and “a godsend”. But English councils have slashed 62% from their spending on youth services – more than £700m – since 2010.

Ayanna credits Bollo with giving her the strength to seek a career in interior design.

“My future would be in prison instead of starting up a career that can probably get me £90k a year,” she said.

But the authorities just don’t understand what’s happening and people in power are remote, they said.

“I think you need people from communities to represent their own community,” said Leon. “The same way I don’t know about the Chelsea garden festival … you don’t know about gang violence.”