As much of life as the world can show: saving London from itself
The capital's "night czar" is under fire amid fears that the vibrancy of the city is dying, and we have to look for solutions urgently
Samuel Johnson famously declared, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. He added, in conversation with his ever-faithful James Boswell, “here is in London all that life can afford”. It was 1777, and the pair were discussing whether Boswell, who lived just off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh’s Old Town and came to London as a visitor, would tire of the capital of he lived there. Johnson, who hated solitude, argued that such a thing was impossible. It was a smaller city than we would recognise today; although comfortably the biggest in Britain, it numbered about 750,000 inhabitants, though that was large enough to be challenging Peking for the world’s largest.
At the last census, in 2021, the population of London was 8,799,800. It is an exceptionally diverse place, only 54 per cent white (compared to 83 per cent for the UK as a whole, that mismatch perhaps explaining a lot about the frequent cross-purposes of our national discourse) with more than 50 major non-indigenous communities and 300 languages. We may now be well down the global list in terms of size—34th, by one reckoning, nowhere near Chongqing’s 32,054,159—but we are among the most cosmopolitan.
Despite that, there is a feeling that the nightlife of London, the lifeblood of a city that feels vibrant, is ailing and ailing badly. In the spotlight recently has been the performer Amy Lamé, born in New Jersey but since November 2016 London’s night czar. I don’t intend to say much substantive here on the subject, though I will return to it, but I thought it might be helpful, for me if for no-one else, to consolidate some recent thoughts on the general issue of the capital as a 24-hour city.
The mere possibility of round-the-clock hospitality is relatively recent. England introduced strict licensing laws during the First World War, under the peculiar cover of the Defence of the Realm Act 1914, and what had been intended as wartime expedients proved durable. Younger people may think I’m mad but I can remember when pubs still had to close for a period of time in the afternoons, a stricture only abolished by the Licensing Act 1988. What changed the game, at least potentially, however, was the Licensing Act 2003, which consolidated various permissions into a single licence, authority over the issuing of which was given to local authorities. Crucially, the act scrapped most blanket restrictions on licensing hours, making it possible to be granted a 24-hour licence. In practice, few have been issued: in 2022, there were 10,600 premises with round-the-clock licences, of which only a tenth were pubs, bars and nightclubs.
The first pubs licensed to open 24 hours a day appeared in 2012, the Wetherspoon Victoria at Victoria Station and the Hamilton Hall at Liverpool Street. Both are venues more of necessity than choice. In 2018, GLA Economics, an expert group set up to advise the Greater London Authority, published a report entitled London at night: an evidence base for a 24-hour city. This examined the opportunities and challenges of an all-day-and-all-night economy.
Although many of the problems the capital currently faces appeared or were amplified significantly by the Covid-19 pandemic which began in 2020, there has been a discourse around London’s nightlife for some years. The brilliant Joy Lo Dico is well worth reading on this: in 2012, despite having a 10-year-old daughter, she made the counter-intuitive and counter-cultural decision to move to Soho, the very heart of London nightlife. She looked back on her first year in The Evening Standard, and was very positive.
We are here not to hide but to shed our façades, to live closely, noisily in the intimacy of the city… as a family, [we] are not exceptional. Many who live here have unconventional lives, and we fit in. If anything, we are more normal than most. But the thing I am certain of is that a half-empty life in West London, chasing others’ ideals, would have been far more corrupting than Soho will ever be.
Later that year, in The Independent, she argued that Soho’s character, seedy, shabby, disreputable but vibrant, was vital to its place in the city.
Hands off our seedy Soho: Do we really want our London streets ‘cleaned up’?
For The Evening Standard in 2018 she described how Soho had changed but the impact of one’s own ageing too.
Soho’s not dead—it just makes you nostalgic for your own youth
Joy currently writes regularly for The Financial Times. Just as the pandemic crowded in on Britain, she explained that she still relished life in the capital.
Escape from suburbia: why I love living in central London
In August 2021, she again argued for the essential character of her neighbourhood and warned that it was at risk.
How Soho went from rough and ready to sleek and sterile
In 2022, with the worst immediate effects of the pandemic and lockdown behind us, Jake Denton reviewed London as a 24-hour city for the recently deceased Vice.
Is London Still a 24-Hour City? I Tried to Find Out.
Later that year, the versatile French writer Marie le Conte, in The New Statesman, praised the capital but warned that there was danger ahead. “I am proud to live in the city I love, but I worry it is dying, and that no one really cares.”
Why can’t the UK get over its hatred of London?
The current controversy was, I fear stoked, perhaps unwittingly, by Lamé and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. On 3 March, the night czar appeared on the BBC’s Politics London, telling the interviewer “We are a truly 24-hour city”. Khan tweeted a clip to his followers, boasting “London is leading the world in its 24-hour policy with other global cities looking to us for inspiration”. The tone this struck was wrong. It felt boastful and vainglorious, but more importantly it seemed not to resonate with people’s experiences.
The Conservatives in the London Assembly have, of course, seen a political opportunity, especially with the election for mayor only two months way. They are pursuing Lamé through official channels, questioning her role. Luke Black, chairman of LGBT+ Conservatives, has been sharply critical of the night czar.
Hollie Geraghty, writing for NME, has charted the row.
London Mayor and Night Czar under attack for claiming city has “24 hour culture”
Lucy Burton, employment editor of The Daily Telegraph, argues that the mayor has allowed London’s nightlife to wither.
How nightlife died in Sadiq Khan’s London
Sophie Lam, travel editor of i News, has argued that London lags far behind a number of other cities including Berlin, Buenos Aires and Beirut.
London will never be a truly 24-hour city
Robert Jenrick, having grabbed a public profile with his resignation as immigration minister over the Rwanda scheme, took to The Telegraph to broaden the attack on Khan’s management of London.
Sadiq Khan’s woeful mayoralty has destroyed London’s once great nightlife
Recently, with days left before the mayoral election, Mimi Yates, director of engagement at the Adam Smith Institute, summed up the problems for CapX, particularly highlighting the damaging effects of strict regulation by local authorities.
London’s nightlife in on the rocks
For more detailed criticism and analysis, I have enjoyed recently Sam Bidwell’s mournful piece for The Critic, in which he laments that “Britain is a miserable, expensive country, governed by the whims of curtain-twitching vested interests”.
In an equally plangent mood, Will Lloyd, for The New Statesman, argues that the vibrancy which drew Virginia Woolf inexorably to London and away from the country house holidays of her childhood, has gone.
The city Woolf moved to no longer exists. You do not move to London to find that everything is new, different and on trial. You move here and discover that most of the restaurants won’t seat you after 9pm, that the pubs are closed by 11.30. Bohemia only lives in old books.
From writer Ed West’s enjoyable Substack The Wrong Side of History there is a prescription for revitalising the capital. One notion caught my eye in particular.
I would take licensing powers away from inner city boroughs and make them my responsibility; the same goes for parking and planning, which would also be better run on a city-wide basis rather than suiting narrow local interests.
This goes to the heart of the NIMBYism which bedevils much of central London.
No doubt this will run and run, even if, as seems likely, Khan wins a third term as mayor in May. It intrigues (and worries) me, so I’m sure I will come back to it on several occasions. In the meantime, here are a few pieces I have penned over the years which are relevant to the general debate in various ways.
Mayor 2.0: London deserves a leader who can punch at the capital’s weight
Members’ clubs in the age of Covid, from Groucho to Boisdale
Rolling out the welcome map for tourists will pay off for London
London needs to have the powers to control its own destiny – and transport
Corbin & King has fallen: What does it mean for The Wolseley, Zedel et al?
Great transport means opportunities – we just need to learn how to fund it
London has a Soho problem. We need to fix it now.
London’s night life is in dire straits, and Sadiq Khan is unlikely to turn it around
I love London and visited last year to celebrate my 60th birthday. I think COVID is most likely responsible for a lot of the issues but this is happening everywhere. The placeI live, a North-East coastal town, used to have a bustling night life and probably more pubs than anywhere else in England. Everyone is piling on too soon though. We're less than 2 years out of when Covid brought the world to a standstill. We still need time to recover; London included. And I think it will.