Regulating the Night

Race, Culture and Exclusion in the Making of the Night-time Economy

Deborah Talbot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754647522
• eBook ISBN: 9781317068709
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The promotion of night-time economies in town centres across Britain has sparked new fears about disorder, violence and binge-drinking. However, there has been little consideration of the social and cultural benefits of a diverse urban nightlife. This timely work examines the processes that have led to a mainstreaming of subcultural expression at night, and the impact of legislation aimed at providing the police and councils with new powers to manage and contain the 'social problem' of contemporary nightlife. Based on an ethnographic study of a London locality, the book examines the unwitting consequences of local decision-making, and the contradictory struggles that ensued. Utilizing the concept of the 'outsider area' as a space that stands outside of conventional norms, and where cultural innovation and transgression can occur, it explores the social consequences of losing contact with the 'other'.

Chapter One Nightlife and Outsider Areas in an Era of Spatial and Subcultural Closure: Recasting the Politics of Popular Culture

DOI: 10.4324/9781315604541-1

In June 2000, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced during a lecture to students in Tubingen, Germany, that the government intended to introduce ‘on the spot’ fines to “drunken thugs” who caused mayhem in the streets at night. Activities that had caught his particular attention included “kicking in your gate”, “throwing traffic cones around the street” and “hurling abuse into the night sky” (Evening Standard, 20 June 2000). Clearly unaware of the long-standing tradition of juxtaposing traffic cones with street furniture as a creative gesture when under the influence, the speech heralded an abrupt about turn in attitudes towards developments at night in major city centres. The conventional excesses of the ‘night-time economy’¹ had suddenly become visible to academics and policy-makers and respectable opinion declared itself aghast at the crime, violence, noise and nuisances they had seemingly for the first time witnessed. What had over the past decade become mainstream opinion, that the ‘night-time economy’ held benefits for economic development, regeneration and social order, was reversed. The Licensing Act 2003, which was five years in the making and summarised the drift of opinion towards reframing the nature of control over leisure (Talbot 2006), was declared unhelpful to the irrepressible tendency of the British public towards ‘binge drinking’ and petty street disorder.

1 This book will alternatively refer to the activities taking place in bars and clubs as nightlife or the ‘night-time economy’, the former to refer to the quasi-commercialised designation of these spaces and the latter to the boosterist representation of these activities as a means to regenerate inner city areas.

Taking into account the traditional problem of ‘set’ and ‘setting’, the complex interaction between pharmacology, physiology, psychology and social/cultural context (Homel and Clarke 1994, Alcohol Concern 2004), which entails that the problem of excessive drinking needs to be seen as part of a range of contextual influences (Talbot unpublished), the argument that extending licensing hours and increasing supply will in simplistic causal fashion encourage a ‘continental drinking culture’ was obviously overoptimistic. As various thinkers have suggested (Gofton 1990, Hobbs et al 2003, Measham and Brain 2005), given the massive social, cultural and economic changes that have engendered an individualistic consumer culture, the idea that excess, alienation and personal destructiveness will somehow diminish over time cannot be taken for granted. As writers such as Lyng (2004) have also pointed out, the risk-absent nature of post-industrial society can serve as a challenge towards bodily excess, and this, combined with the intertwined relationship between national identity and drinking culture in the UK, suggested where change was headed. Moreover, government has sought to harness the potential of nightlife as an economic driver, using so-called ‘night-time economies’ to fuel inner city regeneration. In our neo-liberal and post-modern society, it is felt, rather than problematising transgressive and disorderly behaviour, the national and local government has aligned themselves with the breweries to encourage consumption, leading to the escalation of social problems associated with the night (Hobbs et al. 2003).

These narratives of social change are not the only dynamic to be witnessed in discourses surrounding nightlife or the night-time economy, however, as the current about-turn in law and policy towards enhancing police powers over licensed spaces suggests. Attitudes towards nightlife have a longer history that needs to be placed in an appropriate context. Particularly since the eighteenth century in the British context, the spaces of ‘night culture’ have been understood as a social problem and as a site for deviant behaviour. Although the control of alcohol consumption had an even longer legal history (Webb and Webb 1903) the Disorderly Houses Act 1952, which innovated new forms of regulation over entertainment within a twenty mile radius of London, marked a key change in governmental discourse. From this point, discussions of the ‘problem’ of nightlife, of the disorder and even potential revolution resulting from it, was connected to the entertainment of the ‘lower orders’ (Fielding 1951) and of fears surrounding the night and the dark spaces of the city (Lovatt 1996). In the twentieth century, fear of the ‘other’ found new objects of concern – the impact of migrants, youthful rebellion, or young women seeking pleasure (Kohn 1992). Nightlife expressed a sense of ‘otherness’ that had to be ‘regulated and contained’ (Lovatt 1996:143-144).

As this book will examine in more detail, government has since the nineteenth century held a contradictory attitude towards drinking in particular and popular entertainment in general that has reflected broader political and social conflicts. In the nineteenth century, the proponents of the free-market emphasised the need for individual liberty and personal choice, making behaviour and consumption the responsibility of the individual, while Temperance and other moral entrepreneurs stressed the corrosive effects of drinking (Harrison 1994), resulting in an uneasy balance between permissiveness and containment. Entertainment forms lacking in commercial purpose have been heavily policed and curtailed (Storch 1976), while the language of fear and disorder have had a continued presence in governmental thinking. Despite recent changes, these contradictions have still not been resolved, with health professionals, academics and policy-makers opposed to the breweries, pub and club chains and the neo-liberal wing of New Labour while the passing of draconian laws to tackle disorder and ‘anti-social behaviour’ continues apace in a new dramatisation of a very old narrative.

The point of the research that is the subject of this book was to analyse the moment of change that occurred in the 1990s when local councils began to concede to the relaxation of closing times and the expansion of supply under pressure from government and local economic conditions. Was it the case that these changes represented a de facto concession to deregulation and permissiveness, or was the outcome more complex than this? What were the broader social, economic and cultural pressures at play? What did these economic and regulatory changes mean for what had been spaces at the forefront of ‘outsider’ (Becker 1963) cultures? To what extent were these changes applied differentially and how did the social and institutional conflicts of particular localities influence the nature of change?

An area was selected as a means of examining these questions, an area given the pseudonym of ‘Southview’.² In Southview regeneration strategies had sought to develop the centre of Southview into a night-time economy which many local people viewed suspiciously as a strategy to develop a ‘playground’ for young white professionals at the expense of the ‘ownership’ of the area by the local Afro-Caribbean population. Revisiting Southview in 1998, it was not possible at least superficially to argue with this interpretation. Daytime and night-time consumption was a somewhat segregated affair, with the local black population using the day economy to shop and young white people using the night economy to party in ‘down market chic’ bars and clubs, serviced by black bouncers, taxi drivers and dealers at the bottom end of the chain (Ruggiero 1993). This would not be unusual had it not been for the disappearance of a visible black nightlife that had dominated Southview since the 1970s. As this book will convey, this picture was simplistic. It was nevertheless the case that a significant change had occurred, was discussed locally by many residents, and evoked images of a racialised gentrification discussed by Zukin (1991,1996) or Davis (1990, 2005) in the US. New forms of incorporation and regulation were being innovated in Southview but seemed be taking a specific form. The attempt to understand the dynamics of this process became the main research focus of this book.

2 The rationale for area anonymity is explored in chapter two.

More broadly, the aim of this book was to outline the origin of these debates, their consequences in terms of regulatory reform, and finally the impact of new laws and economic strategies on outsider or transgressive subcultures. Particular emphasis is given to how outsider cultures were represented spatially – both in night spaces and specific areas or localities – and how attempts to normalise these spaces and localities through strategies of regeneration or gentrification (Smith 1996) confronted these alternative cultures. This chapter will outline the relationship between licensing law and transgressive cultures historically and its reconfiguration in the context of the critical mass of economic, cultural and social change of the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, it examines the way that outsider cultures have been shaped by the dual processes of moral panic and a legal innovation concerned primarily with containing the night entertainment of women, ethnic minorities, the working class and youth. Central to evaluating the critical importance of a radicalised night culture is the concept of the outsider or the ‘other’, that can be conceived of as an individual, a group, a space or as an area. In the specific moment of post second world war Britain social perspectives changed markedly in specific areas and cultures, giving rise to spaces of difference or outsider areas that were ultimately stigmatised. The historical residue of stigma in area development and the formulation of strategy are of central importance throughout this book in that it mobilised opinion towards the normalisation of the outsider area and the closure of the physical and mental space of the counterculture. The impact of this closure – the colonisation of the counterculture and the rediscovery of disorder as a descriptor of nightlife – is examined towards the end of this chapter.

The Regulation of the ‘Other’: Alcohol, Popular Culture and Licensing Law

The nature of popular culture and nightlife in the UK have been heavily influenced historically by licensing laws and associated forms of control through surveillance and policing, in particular, the symbolic association made between working-class entertainment (popular culture) and social disorder, decline, rebellion and riot. As Dorn (1983) argued, an understanding of history is important if we are to view current dilemmas with anything beyond simplistic formulations and in particular this book is predicated on the idea that conflict and control throughout history has shaped the nature of space. Moreover, it is not possible to consider the nature and impact of licensing law without a consideration of its origins given that its current form is largely derived from liquor licensing law from the fifteenth century and entertainment licensing law from the eighteenth.

The earliest law concerning alcohol was passed in 1381 but was aimed merely at the regulation of price to prevent inflation and the cheapening of the coinage (Dorn 1983). However, statutes dating from the fifteenth century established a connection between the consumption of alcohol and labour discipline. As Dorn (1983) and Harrison (1994) argued, alcohol consumption was identified from this point onwards with lax attendance and productivity, political agitation amongst the working-class, riot, disorder and revolution. Drinking and entertainment was seen as a barrier to a longer more regular working week and the intensification of work required by industrialisation. A series of Acts in 1603, 1606, 1635, 1644 and 1647 dictated where and when drinking could take place, ranging from restricting drinking in Inns to residents, banning entertainment on religious days and making drunkenness an offence (Dorn 1983). However, as the Temperance campaigners Sydney and Beatrice Webb (1903) noted, state involvement in the sale and consumption of alcohol was also motivated by two conflicting interests: firstly, the revenue derived from taxes on liquor on the one hand combined with the growing power of the free-trade breweries, and secondly the ‘social disease’ – the combination of economic deprivation, moral dissolution and indiscipline – that appeared to originate from alcohol on the other. In the case of the latter, concerns about the social effects of alcohol were in particular highlighted by religious and socialist reform movements who campaigned without success to prohibit the sale of alcohol (Dingle 1980).

Orwell (1940:41) pointed to the hypocrisy embedded in English licensing laws that were ‘designed to interfere with everybody but in practice allowed everything to happen’. At the core of this contradiction lay a conflict of interest within the state itself in so far as it expressed the needs of capitalist reproduction. On the one hand, as indicated above, it was interested in both the taxation revenue gained from the production of liquor and the survival of the industry itself as a core lobby and part of the economy. On the other, it was keen to make provision to prevent drunkenness and entertainment interfering with the working week, as in practices such as ‘Saint Monday’³ (Harrison 1994). Licensing law was never innovated therefore to prohibit the consumption of alcohol so much as regulate the conditions of its use within what were perceived as acceptable outlets for supply (Dorn 1983). The way that licensing law reflected such practices of inclusion and exclusion in the ability to control outlets for alcohol consumption and entertainment often coincided with the interests of the breweries and ensured cooperation and self-regulation.

3 This was an extension of leisure time into Monday, and illustrated a different pattern of work that involved periods of intense work pasting a few days followed by a similar period of rest and repose. Industrial society required a regular working week, which clashed with these practices.

The ability to mediate permissiveness and control derived from the structure of licensing law and its institutional implementation. As Webb and Webb (1903:4) noted, licensing law regulated supply in four key ways: firstly, through the payment of taxes and fees for sale and manufacture; secondly, through the registering of individual licensees so they were ‘brought to public notice’; thirdly, through the limitations placed on the number of alehouses in localities and on the qualifications needed to be a keeper; lastly, through the imposition of special rules or conditions of sale. The local operation of the law involved three forms of control exercised by magistrates’: the ‘power of selection’, the ‘power of withdrawal’ and the ‘power of imposing conditions’. The first power came with a 1552 statute (5&6 Edward VI.c.25) in which a license became a privilege, not a right, and magistrates’ had the power to select through the exercise of discretion who should be given that privilege. The second power came earlier, with the 1495 (11 Henry VII.c.2) and 1504 (19 Henry VII.c.12) Acts, by which two justices could suspend what were seen as superfluous alehouses (Webb and Webb 1903:6). The third power came from a combination of the first two, and before the 1830 Beer Act judges had total autonomy to impose conditions, such as closing times, the number of licensed venues in areas, where public houses could be situated in the locality and so on (Webb and Webb 1903:9).

These three basic powers have been negotiated and altered in different historical periods depending on prevailing opinion. As already mentioned, in a unique drawing back of statute law, the Beer Act 1830 restricted judicial discretion, specifying that it was limited to making sure the applicant was of good character. The power of withdrawal was placed within the jury system, and parliament argued significantly that the publican should be free to do whatever parliament had not expressly forbidden (Webb and Webb 1903:98). The consequences of this liberalisation was that the number of retailers of liquor grew and as fears spiralled with regard to the growing level of drunkenness, magistrates and bishops agitated for a repeal of the Act. In the winter of 1830 a Parliamentary Committee was formed led by James Silk, Temperance in character, and the following Beerhouse Acts of 1834 and 1840 enhanced the powers of the justices’ with regard to the owners ‘qualities’. Despite these shifts and reversals, the basic structure of licensing law and the powers granted to the state to control places of drinking remains similar to the structure of law today and as this book will aim to demonstrate, these specificities of quasi-legal practice embedded in licensing law conferred the ability of magistrates and other empowered authorities to control cultural and social spaces.

Controls over the spaces of popular entertainment were further enhanced by the development of entertainment licensing law in the mid eighteenth century, notably through the Disorderly Houses Act 1752 or as more accurately named ‘An Act for the Better Preventing Thefts and Robberies, and for Regulating Places of Public Entertainments, and Punishing Persons Keeping Disorderly Houses’, and it was here that the ideological intent of regulatory strategies were most clearly illustrated. It became part of statute as a result of a petition by writer and magistrate’ Henry Fielding⁴ to the Lord High Chancellor, which drew attention to the growth in ‘criminal’ activities in the lower classes and speculated as to their cause. In Fielding’s reasoning, the decoupling of the lower orders from feudal bondage had steadily inculcated new customs into this section of society. The growth of wealth resulting from growing trade had created a demand for labour in return for a wage, the latter of which was squandered in the pursuit of ‘luxury’ by the lower classes. This was problematic, according to Fielding, because while luxury and pleasure led to vice and ruination amongst the upper classes, it was confined to the family and estate. When the lower orders adopted the same habits, however, it shook the foundation of wealth, because it was their labour that underpinned society. Hence for Fielding the chief evils of the pursuit of pleasure by the lower orders were the loss of money and time, and, of course, an increase in drunkenness. Moreover, Fieldi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One Nightlife and Outsider Areas in an Era of Spatial and Subcultural Closure: Recasting the Politics of Popular Culture
• Chapter Two Negotiating Research into the Regulation of ‘Outsider’ Areas
• Chapter Three The Growth, Criminalisation and Decline of Unregulated Night Spaces in Southview
• Chapter Four Urban Regeneration, Conflict and Change
• Chapter Five From Nightlife to the ‘Night-time Economy’
• Chapter Six Licensing and the Loss of Political and Moral Authority
• Chapter Seven Licensing, Policing and Informal Mechanics of Exclusion
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index