It’s no surprise that Britain’s night economy is in dire straight given a quarter of people told pollsters they would like to see nightclubs permanently closed even after the pandemic. Yet nobody embodies modern society’s contempt for club culture quite like Amy Lamé, Sadiq Khan’s embattled ‘Night Czar’.
Places that ought to be the capital’s dedicated nightlife districts, such as Soho, are being squeezed to death
Yes, as she stressed in a recent op-ed defending her record, she did her stint on the scene herself. But as any investor will tell you, past performance is no guarantee of future returns – and Lamé’s record speaks for itself. According to figures from the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA), since she was first installed in 2016, the capital has lost almost half of its nightclubs.
The Night Czar has plenty of excuses, first and foremost the pandemic. But while lockdown obviously had a impact on the scene, the problem long predates it: between 2007 and 2018, London lost 40 per cent of its live music venues and half its clubs. Lamé’s abject record is a fall from an already terrible starting point. She assumed responsibility for a sector in dire straits, and has done absolutely nothing to stop the bleeding.
Indeed, she has found plenty of time for globetrotting at the taxpayers’ expense, but a 2019 FOI of her diary found very little in it, and no meetings with the industry at all. None of this seems to have troubled Khan, who last year handed Lamé a 40 per cent pay rise – now at £120,000 a year – and allowed her to start being paid through a company, Amy Lamé Ltd, to cut her tax bill too.
Perhaps this is why the Night Czar is so determined to pin responsibility for the state of the sector anywhere except its main cause: the politicians. The biggest structural challenge facing clubs, bars, and other late-night venues in London is licencing. It is all but impossible for prospective businesses to get the necessary permissions from local authorities, whose councillors answer only to a truculent minority of local residents that turn out for council elections or, worse, to licencing committee meetings.
Even places that ought to be the capital’s dedicated nightlife districts, such as Soho, are being squeezed to death by locals who, despite choosing to live in a historic party area, feel entitled to the same peace and quiet one finds in the suburbs. Noise complaints shut venues – and where they don’t, they lead to ever-more early kicking out times, and music controls that kill the vibe even before that unhappy hour.
If it isn’t residents, it might be the police. Remember the absurd battle over whether or not Greggs – not a rave club, not a dive bar, Greggs – would be able to trade from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., in central London? The Met warned it would become a locus for ‘crime and disorder’. A bakery.
Naturally, there is no record of Lamé taking the fight to local authorities over this. Nor of Khan, happy to demand extra powers to set rent controls, seeking control over licencing to protect the capital’s nightlife.
All this has been deeply corrosive to London. Spontaneous nights out, rolling from bar to bar as the flow takes you, are all but impossible. Destination clubbing, focused on larger venues such as Fabric and Ministry of Sound, has it slightly better. But the trend is still downward there too. Remarkably, two of the venues namechecked by the Night Czar in her defence of her record – G-A-Y and Printworks, the latter was consistently voted Europe’s best nightclub – have shut down.
The real tragedy in all this is contrasting Lamé with Sacha Lord, her counterpart in Manchester. Lord, an unpaid adviser, has built a real profile as a champion of the night economy, and been unafraid to speak bluntly about the challenges facing the sector. Meanwhile Lamé, with her 97th-percentile salary, offers only excuses. Her boast that ‘London is the best 24-hour city in the world’ could be believed only by someone who has never visited another global city – or indeed, can’t read a clock.
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