Steph Meskell-Brocken’s chapter uses Edward Soja’s Thirdspace theory to question simplistic assumptions about arts participation, place-making and young people. The essay argues that cultural policy often treats non-arts spaces as automatically more accessible, assuming that if art is moved into familiar community locations, excluded audiences will naturally engage. Meskell-Brocken challenges this view by asking whether an arts intervention might instead disturb the meanings that young people already attach to a space, especially when that space is associated with leisure, friendship or informal activity. Drawing on Soja and Lefebvre, the chapter explains space through three interrelated dimensions: Firstspace as material and perceived space, Secondspace as conceived or planned space, and Thirdspace as lived, imagined and transformative space. This third dimension is crucial because it refuses simple binaries between physical and symbolic, centre and margin, art and everyday life. For young people, this matters because they are often treated as incomplete citizens, “not-yets”, or marginal participants in cultural discourse. A Thirdspace approach instead recognises them as active producers of meaning, capable of reshaping the spaces they inhabit. The chapter’s examples, including Blackpool’s Art B&B and Manchester’s Horsfall, show how cultural spaces can combine heritage, art, community work and social purpose without reducing one element to another. Meskell-Brocken also critiques deficit models in arts policy, where certain areas are labelled as lacking culture rather than understood through their existing everyday practices. Ultimately, the chapter argues for a more inclusive, spatially sensitive cultural practice: one that listens to young people, recognises their everyday forms of participation and treats space not as a neutral container but as a contested, emotional and political field. Place-making, then, should not impose culture from outside; it should emerge through shared transformation.