Good riddance to London’s dreadful ‘night tsar’

Amy Lamé, London’s first ever ‘night tsar’, will be stepping down from her duties at the end of this month. After eight years in the role, Lamé announced yesterday that it was the ‘right time to move on’. London mayor Sadiq Khan thanked her for her service, congratulating her for having ‘worked hard ​​to help London’s nightlife through huge challenges, including the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis’. He may well be the only Londoner who’ll be sorry to see her go.

Lamé, who is a comedian and radio DJ by trade, was appointed by City Hall in 2016 and bestowed with the task of reviving London’s ailing night-time scene. Her position was supposed to be all about saving clubs from closure, helping businesses stay open later, encouraging concerts and cultural events, and halting the exodus of pub landlords. So how did she get on?

Despite receiving a vast salary of £132,000 (following her fourth pay rise, from £120,000 just a few months ago), Lamé has presided over the degradation of London’s nightlife. She certainly hasn’t made it any easier to get your hands on a late-night pint. Between 2001 and 2022, the number of pubs in the capital fell from 5,000 to 2,600, with a whopping 100 shutting their doors every year in the past three years.

Clubs and bars haven’t fared much better than the traditional boozer, either, with 1,100 closing since 2021. LGBT venues have suffered in particular, with more than half shutting between 2006 and 2022 – especially ironic since Lamé is also an LGBT activist and has rhapsodised about the importance of ‘protecting queer spaces’.

‘What about Covid?’, we might ask, if we were feeling charitable to Ms Lamé. Obviously, lockdowns and social-distancing measures dealt a hammer blow to the capital’s nightlife. But this can’t explain why night-time venues have been closing at a faster rate in London than most other cities in the country.

There are other problems that have gone unaddressed, too. Most notably, the tyranny of noise complaints. Local residents have seemingly near-total control over whether a venue is allowed to keep operating after dark. The mere whiff of an angry letter might see a bar’s licence revoked or prevent revellers from standing outside a pub after sundown. In 2022, having barely made it through lockdown, George Orwell’s favourite pub, the Compton Arms in Islington, was threatened by the local council to keep the noise down or face closure. The pub – which has been operating since 1800 and boasts a ‘seasonally led’ ‘small-plates menu’ – was apparently causing too much of a ruckus for the local killjoys. Thankfully, it survived, although other businesses have been much less fortunate.

Our noble night tsar has done little to push back against any of this. Instead, Lamé seemed to dedicate her time to dud schemes like her much-mocked Night Time Enterprise Zones. These sound, on the surface, like exactly the kind of thing a night tsar should be setting up. You’d probably imagine they involve making it easier for restaurants to open later, letting the Tube run for longer or reducing the power that noise complaints have to destroy late-night venues. Instead, the scheme revolved around funding LGBT murals in Vauxhall, a night-time ‘culture trail’ in Greenwich and a programme to raise awareness for ‘neurodiversity’ in Bromley.

To give her the slightest bit of credit, Lamé did help to re-open and protect a handful of notable clubs in the capital, including the iconic Fabric. But this is hardly a drop in the bucket of the thousands of other businesses that have had to shut their doors, drastically reduce their hours or were never able to open at all under her watch. Yes, plenty of factors – like the pandemic, the overreach of local authorities or the whinging of NIMBYish residents – were outside of her control. But it felt like she barely even tried to fight against this on behalf of London’s nightlife.

It’s hard to have much sympathy for Lamé when, for almost a decade, she watched as London declined from a bustling metropolis, world-famous for its legendary nightlife, to a decrepit ghost town after dark. From the city that gave us Soho and Shoreditch, to one that actively discourages people from watching England play in the Euros finals.

So long, Amy Lamé, and thanks for nothing. I’d raise a toast, if only there were a bar still open to serve me.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.