As well as weekly training sessions and league games, the organisation's volunteers try to act as mentors by helping the players with job applications, asylum applications and personal problems.

None of the 140 children — aged eight to 13 — who attend this buzzing club are old enough to know about the personal tragedy that drove the 48-year-old single mother to take it on in the first place. Fourteen years ago, her 16-year-old son Okera was knifed to death by a teenager while he was playing in the street with friends. Ms Clarke, who was completing a psychology course at Thames Valley University and also raising her four younger children, then aged one to 14, tried to cope with her loss by volunteering to help at her estate's after-school club.

Since their formation last October, the group have held four “community unity” meetings on different estates to tackle knife and gun crime, and address wider social and economic problems. It has been funded wholly out of their own pockets but a £5,000 grant from the Evening Standard's Dispossessed Fund will allow the BLBC to expand their outreach meetings.

So far 34 young people have been supported with their university careers in the last three years. These young people are undertaking courses as diverse as Philosophy and Computer Games Development.