Debunking the weird myths about London's 24-hour party people

Why are so many people desperate to believe the capital's nightlife is dead?

One of the author’s extensive collection of blurry, badly composed club photos. Dialled In @ The Cause, Sep 2024

There is a strangely committed contingent of Londoners who are just dying to believe that the capital’s nightlife is dead and buried. Ever since Sadiq Khan launched his ‘Vision for London as a 24-hour city’ in 2017, and particularly in the last two years, there has been a growing clamour to prove that it is no such thing. “London: the city that constantly sleeps,” wrote James Ball, the author of a book about fake news. “London is finished,” ran another typical comment. They were both responding to an “in depth”, data-led article in Friday’s Times that claimed to have proved conclusively — with hard numbers, no less — the zeitgeist’s received wisdom. As their headline put it: “UK’s worst night out? Costly, crime-ridden London”. The Times analysed the weekend closing times of pubs, bars and nightclubs in Britain’s 12 biggest cities, and London came bottom of the list — with Manchester winner of the 24/7 Olympics, and even chocolate-boxy Edinburgh doing far better in 5th place. This poor showing is folded into a wider London Declinism: the capital’s nightlife is deployed as a proxy for its spirit; which is now said to be tame, lame — domesticated. Finished.

Let’s quickly go through the Times’s data and methodology that produced this headline-grabbing result, because both are staggeringly poor. They scraped Google Maps for closing times for pubs, bars and nightclubs in those 12 cities. These all serve different functions and customers, but sure — that’s the dataset. There is a map of London venues open after 2am embedded in the article, so I zoomed in on my local high street, Peckham’s Rye Lane. Three venues are listed there as open after 2am on Saturday night: Tola, the Prince of Peckham, and the Bussey Building. My raver alarm immediately went off. Just from going out dancing in Peckham, I know that this is rubbish. That list is missing the Carpet Shop (open till 4am), Peckham Audio (4am), Peckham Levels (4am, albeit occasionally) and Four Quarters (3am). There are also at least five pubs I can think of around Rye Lane which open until 1am on a Saturday night, new audiophile bar Jumbi is open until 2am — I could go on, but let’s stick to the ‘after 2am’ spots. Even from that small sample, of one street in London I happen to know well, the Times’s dataset is less than 50% complete. An amazing start.

Here’s my main complaint though: the Times have calculated the vibrancy of each city’s nightlife by measuring late-opening venues as a proportion of the total number of venues in that city. I only have a Maths A-level, and I’ve forgotten most of it, but that seems to me an utterly bizarre metric. Why would you not simply calculate the number of late venues per 100,000 head of population? Surely the obvious thing to do. To give an example of how weird this is: if the tiny village of Sesh-on-the-Wold has one pub, but that pub happens to have acquired a late license until 3am, then 100% of its venues are late venues, and the village is — according to the Sunday Times — a non-stop, modern day Dionysia.

Furthermore, if any of the 12 cities they studied has a disproportionately thriving pub scene, that will bring its late-opening average down significantly, because, er, pubs shut earlier. As someone pointed out on Twitter, because of the nature of the banker-beast, the City of London has a very small resident population, and many of its pubs are there to serve office workers in midweek, and shut completely at the weekend. Another thing which skews a dataset that was wildly incomplete to begin with, and tells us nothing about the vibrancy of nightlife in Peckham, Clapham, Camden or Hackney.

The Times piece takes some extraordinary liberties. The third paragraph reads in full: “London was once a world-class nightlife destination but it now has fewer venues open past 2am than any other major British city.” The phrasing here is an egregious distortion even of their own flawed dataset, and their own flawed way of measuring it, and should never have made it past the subs’ desk. As a statement, it is simply false — London is bigger than any other British city by some margin, and obviously it has more venues open past 2am. Any self-respecting newspaper would publish a correction.

So to repeat my question: why would a team of award-winning data journalists choose such a peculiar metric? Could it be that they tried other metrics, and it didn’t give them the answer they wanted, with London dead last? Read the piece in full, and there is a clear London Declinist narrative running throughout, from the headline to its second major piece of reporting: whereby the three Times journalists go out vox-popping, and gather some extremely silly, partial anecdotes to back up their dodgy numbers. This ludicrous tableau could be straight out of the Brass Eye ‘Decline’ episode:

A common London scene which we definitely all recognise as real, c/o the Times

The myth that London has had its 24-hour, 365-party-girl lifestyle crushed in the last few years crops up from the left through to the liberal centre, to the Daily Mail and the Times, and, significantly, to the international far-right, who tie it to the following constellation of sometimes implied, sometimes spelled-out racist fictions:

1. Sadiq Khan has introduced Sharia Law (lol — the GLA constitution barely lets the Mayor run the buses)

2. London has witnessed a terrifying crime surge in recent years (it simply hasn’t - gun crime is down, knife crime is down, murder is down, and antisocial behaviour is among the lowest in the entire country)

3. London is full of no-go areas (pfft)

As an aside, these racist myths kind of cancel each other out: you’d think the fictional city-wide Sharia Law and the fictional Jihadi militias lurking in Tower Hamlets would help address the fictional crime wave wouldn’t you?

The thing is, obviously pubs and nightclubs alike are facing massive challenges in a city beset by landlordism, gentrification, and soaring rent and other costs — as they are elsewhere, in cities I am less familiar with, too. I am absolutely not saying everything is rosy in London club or publand. I’ve been writing about the threats to London’s nightlife for way more than a decade, from breaking the notorious Form 696 story in 2008-9, to the threats to much-missed Shoreditch club Plastic People from Hackney Council and the Met in 2010, to world-famous Ministry of Sound battling against the gentrification of the Elephant in 2015, to pubgoers using Asset of Community Value legislation to save their beloved local boozers. Terrible data journalism folded into right-wing scaremongering about a crime-ridden dystopia does nothing to help save pubs, bars and clubs.

The problem with journalism on this subject in general is that too few people want to get into the nitty gritty of the fights to save these spaces, nor the macro-economic neoliberal causes of the struggles they are enduring. Instead, people want to wave their hands histrionically and wail that everything’s getting worse in the capital. This fatuous London Declinism mingles with the fog of racist myths outlined above, and occasionally a bit of Gen Z-bashing too: young people often get the blame for not consuming ruinous amounts of alcohol in support of ‘the nighttime economy’. You have to feel sorry for them really: damned if they’re wasted, damned if they’re sober.

One of the things that amuses me most about this bullshit is that shortly after celebrating its 150th anniversary, the London Underground opened at night for the first time in its history in 2016. I remember how much I desperately wished there was such a thing as a Night Tube, going out in a considerably more sketchy London in the late 90s and early 2000s. If you’d offered me a nice warm tube train home, when I was changing nightbuses at Elephant & Castle, waiting alone in the freezing, blustery February rain, at 3am, on my way home from FWD» at Plastic People, I would have fairly bitten your hand off.

I would also remind friends on the left who like to complain about London’s nightlife being ‘finished’, that if it truly was a 24/7 city, this would have huge, terrible ramifications for the lowest-paid workers’ physical and mental health — night-workers literally die younger — and that you are supposed to give a shit about that. Here, relatedly is a New Statesman essay I wrote in 2019 about Jonathan Crary’s magnificent, thought-provoking book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. In short: be careful what you wish for.

The last time there was a round of discourse about the ailing health of the night-time economy — whereupon I wrote this opinion piece for The Guardian — it occurred to me to count how many raves were listed on global dance music hub, Resident Advisor. So I’ve just done the same: there are 105 club nights listed on RA for London this Saturday. That’s not including bars, gigs, pubs with late licenses, and so on — that’s solely the DJ nights that have registered their listings with Resident Advisor. 105 options for one night, just to get you started. But sure, London is dead, over. Finished.

PS: my new book MULTITUDES: How Crowds Made the Modern World is out on 22 October, please pre-order now, come to the launch on 20 October at Conway Hall, or see me talk about it at Burley Fisher Books on 30 October, or at the Whitechapel Gallery on 31 October. Cheers.