Amy Lamé, London’s Night Czar, has always been in a difficult position. Despite being paid a six-figure salary for a part-time role, the purpose of which is to resuscitate London’s shitty nightlife, she has virtually no political power and very ill-defined responsibilities. And as you’ll know if you’ve tried to go out in London after-hours recently, her tenure has not been a success. Added to this, close examination of her name reveals that, were it not for the last-minute intervention of a diacritical mark, she would be called Amy “Lame”: a perilous situation for a London Night Czar to be in when she has done nothing to make London itself anything but lame.
Lamé was hired in 2016 as part of Sadiq Khan’s “plan to turn London into a leading 24-hour global city”, her job being to “champion nightlife and nurture our night time economy”. Since then, some of her more ill-disposed critics have pointed out that she doesn’t seem to have done much to “nurture” London’s night-time economy — apart, that is, from presiding over an impressive salary hike for Night Czars employed by London’s Mayoral Office.
The real challenge when you’re placed in a cushy political role, with negligible power and no prospect of remedying the social ill for which your job has been designed, is sensing when to declare victory. Lamé, it turns out, can’t do this properly either. In a widely ridiculed recent op-ed defending her record, she madly proclaimed London “the best 24-hour city in the world”, one whose “world-renowned nightlife” had left “other global cities looking to [it] for inspiration”. Sitting rather uneasily alongside this vapid triumphalism was repeated acknowledgement of the “huge challenges” London’s night-time economy nonetheless faces.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="More from this author " author="John Maier "]https://staging.unherd.com/2023/11/how-did-oxford-become-so-lame/[/su_unherd_related]
Apparently banking on the fact that no one watching had ever visited another major city, Lamé doubled down on this baffling line in a follow-up interview with the BBC. London, she insisted, was a “truly 24-hour city”. When the awkward question arose of what exactly London’s 24-hour economy consisted of, Lamé’s puzzling first suggestion was people “working for the NHS” — the implication being that, because it is still possible late at night to travel across the capital by ambulance, London is a thriving metropolis. It is difficult to know what makes this defiant style of political gaslighting seem a good idea, even when you bear in mind that Lamé had to account for herself somehow. The claim that London is “the best” 24-hour city in the world isn’t just false — it involves obvious presupposition failure. London is simply not up and running half the time.
Consider, as I often do, drinking. Has London ever been a more hostile environment for late-evening drinkers than it is now? Wander into a London pub at any point after dark, and more likely than not your offer to trade money for alcohol will be met with the familiar vitriolic shake of the barman’s head that conveys the response: “Are you mad? It’s almost 9:30 on a Thursday evening, of course we’re closed.” Over the years, I have gone to simply extraordinary lengths to prolong an evening of drinking in London. I have dashed about town on the shakiest of speculations that some-place-this-guy-knows might still be open. I have climbed into strange taxis with taxing strangers. I have posed as a guest in hotel bars. Seeing no alternative, I have allowed myself to be bullied into nightclubs so unpleasant that no amount of alcohol short of a lethal dosage could alleviate the misery of being there.
On one particularly dispiriting evening, my friends and I once completed the paperwork necessary to join a members-only casino just so that they’d let us carry on drinking their past midnight, a short while after which we were asked to leave for not gambling enough. Dragged against my will in the early hours to a club staffed by topless dancers who seemed to be under instruction to target aloof customers, I found myself explaining, as camply as seemed necessary, that, unlikely as it might sound, I was actually just there for the conversation and the £14 bottles of Heineken. “Everybody gets a dance,” came the ominous reply, as reinforcement hostesses advanced towards me like gunboats out of the half-darkness. I begged; I pleaded incoherently to just be allowed to sit and drink; and somewhere out in the night I could hear the sound of Amy Lamé cashing another enormous cheque.
[su_pullquote]“I begged; I pleaded incoherently to just be allowed to sit and drink”[/su_pullquote]
What kind of society imposes such frightening costs on law-abiding citizens? Dr Johnson conjectured that a man tired of London must be tired of life. But he didn’t know about Sadiq Khan’s “24-hour London Vision”. Today, it is only those who against all the odds haven’t quite given up on living whom London is still able to routinely terrorise and disappoint. Time a midweek visit correctly — either quite early or quite late — and swathes of central London take on a practically post-apocalyptic atmosphere: the streets deserted, the lifeless city resembling a monumental abandoned film-set which you can stamp around like Philip Seymour Hoffman in the closing scenes of Synecdoche New York, wondering whether anyone else has noticed how unhinged things have become.
To make the situation more maddening, the underlying causes of London’s nightlife problem aren’t hard to grasp. The scarcely credible fact that London does not have a network-wide 24-hour underground system discourages businesses from operating, and people from socialising, late in the evening. You can read the deadweight loss off the empty streets. The few places that make a point of staying open late have a captive, self-selected, audience and can be as nasty and expensive as they like.
Civilised nightlife dies under these constraints. In the last three years, 1,100 bars and clubs have closed in London. Added to this, the kind of bars, clubs and pubs that you’d want to stay open are terrorised by local authorities, which allow a small number of hostile actors to behave like veto players over late-night activity: withholding licences, bullying businesses with excess regulation, and ministering to Nimbyist instincts about noise and activity even in the densest and most central parts of London.
It is important not to forget what a manifestly unnatural constraint this is to impose on city life. If there aren’t going to be late-opening bars and restaurants in, say, Soho, then these things aren’t going to be anywhere. And if this is the case, it is not at all obvious what the distinctive function of a city is supposed to be. On that framing, it is no longer true that part of the implicit bargain of city-dwelling is that one sacrifices private space and income in the expectation that one is compensated by a hospitable and vibrant public realm.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading" author="Fred Skulthorp "]https://staging.unherd.com/2024/03/the-battle-for-zone-6s-soul/?ai-debug=0[/su_unherd_related]
All of this raises the question of why anyone would put up with the dysfunctional, life-denying norms that have degraded London’s nightlife. It is tempting to think that the only psychologically sustainable response towards such constraints is complacent acceptance. Perhaps we have become accustomed to thinking of it as a brute inevitability that, mid-conversation and at some point around 10pm, the bells sound out across London, the dentist-chair lighting snaps on, and everyone is instructed to leave — initiating the hard-transition to somewhere grosser, more expensive and further away. It doesn’t help, of course, that the horrors and privations of London’s nightlife are felt mainly by the young, a group which in recent years has revealed itself to have only the feeblest grip on its collective interest as a political class.
One predictable reaction to this dismal picture of youth culture is the sort of self-congratulatory bullet-biting that comes so naturally to the proponents of contemporary public-health moralism. Drinking, carousing, casual sex: these things are bad for you, unhealthy, inherently risky. Better, in the image of Amy Lamé’s London, to have a night-time economy staffed principally by health workers keeping alive a population with increasingly little to live for. On the moralist's view, what might feel like personal deprivation, and the frustration of natural instincts, is in fact all in the service of the theoretic collective good.
During lockdown, many young people self-consciously welcomed the disappearance of Fomo — complacently satisfied by the knowledge that everyone was having as bad a time as they were. Even at the time, it was clear that this reaction expressed a mistakenly parochial view of what counts as missing out. Whole groups and cities, as well as individuals, can miss out if they try hard enough.
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SubscribeWhen the awkward question arose of what exactly London’s 24-hour economy consisted of, Lamé’s first suggestion was people “working for the NHS”
Straight out of the UK bureaucrat’s playbook: when cornered like a rat in a trap, invoke the NHS.
NHS is like a ‘get out of jail free’ card.
I’m just gutted I can’t use it
Dear Mr (soon to be Dr.) Maier: this is what your generation voted for. No s*x, no babies, no carbon footprint, no fun. Crucify yourselves on the altar of Net Zero (but isn’t martyrdom so utterly thrilling?!).
Not to worry. Declare yourself anxious, or depressed, or traumatized and the NHS will happily prescribe a lifetime of valium. You can have a really good time at home with Babycham and Valium.
It easier to get your GP to prescribe hen’s teeth than it is to get them to prescribe diazepam. Why hand out anxiolytics that cost next to nothing when you can prescribe SSRis and Zs at 100x the cost with similar potential dependency problems?
It seems that London is tired of life.
Very good. It seems London is tired of drinking in taverns too.
‘There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.’ – Samuel Johnson.
London just isn’t a 24 hour city. I’m not entirely sure we even have a desire (really) for a 24 hour city.
This person’s role is completely unnecessary and should be scrapped ASAP.
On a side note, it’s really not possible to have a truly 24 hour tube service; those cities that do have several tracks going the same way, allowing engineering work to be done while the other tracks are open. London simply does not have that option.
How often does a track need to be repaired? Assuming we could convert the Tube to driverless trains that run 24/7, how often would maintenance shut a track down?
I believe it’s more maintenance than repairs but it’s quite a slow process (metres at best per evening) and is something all metros do but others have several tracks to allow this to happen. The actual time shut down per night is only around 4 hours and that doesn’t allow time for things to be fully wound down, power off, people and gear down there, and the reverse when the network opens again. All told the tube isn’t down for very long each day, I would doubt enough to say masses are being prevented from enjoying London 24/7.
It was a tangential question obviously: the only way to establish a 24/7 public transport network in London is to automate it, in my view. So I align with your view that even if we did it, it’d make little difference because London isn’t populated with millions of young outgoing people with enough money to stay out at night drinking anyway.
Apparently the London Overground Highbury to south London has to be repaired EVERY SINGLE WEEKEND SINCE IT OPENED IN 2009
God knows what.
In Starmer’s Labour paradise we can expect to see many more Labour Party supporters earning £100,00 + for such non jobs. It is merely a return to the powerful being able to reward their friends and relatives with sinecures at the expense of the public.
It’s surprising how self declared socialists are able to tolerate disproportionate wealth, power and privilege. I guess they need it in order to perfect the world for the glorious revolution.
The author hasn’t caught up with reality (despite flirting with it towards the end). Young people just don’t want to go out as much as they used to. Basically every poll shows this. Covid accelerated the trend but kids (and young people) today are just boring.
…and, perhaps more importantly, skint.
They earn less (adjusted for inflation) pay vastly more in rent, and have a shedload more debt.
Not that hard to understand why they don’t wish to drop a tonne of money on cocktails.
Cocktails!!? In my day we drank halves of swill on weekdays and cocktails once a decade; the pubs closed at 10:30 south of the river and 11:00 north of the river, and trauma surgeons all wanted to train at Charing X hospital given the resulting road mayhem on the bridges. We knew how to enjoy ourselves, but there’s work in the morning….
There’s probably less of them that drink but a majority still go out and misbehave the same as we used to. The problem is sky high rents and stagnant wages have pushed many of them towards the outskirts of the city and also left them with less disposable income. Chuck in the insane prices for a pint in London and you’ve got a perfect storm of lack of youngsters in the area, with a lack of cash and an expensive product
Do too many of them have chronic marijuana and/or “downer” habits? They do make people awfully passive and hence boring.
have you seen the price of three pints of lager and a packet of crisps?
True weed is cheaper
When Ghetto closed, and the alternative-conformism of RVT took over, London’s nightlife was doomed.
I really enjoyed this article…. The author writes well and is funny. What a welcome change that makes.
Couldn’t agree more. Bravo!
Second that
Positively Wodehousian
Spring is here – cider in the park.
American here. I enjoy visiting London and have done so numerous times. One of the things that always impresses me is just how good people there are at gathering outside: picnics, having a few drinks with friends after work, whatever it may be. Americans can learn a thing or two about outdoor fun from Londoners!
American here, as well, and I have no idea what you’re talking about. Backyard barbecues, driveway gatherings, drinks by the pool, tailgate parties, post-hike picnics, restaurants and bars packed with people, beaches and lakes filled with happy crowds . . . That’s daily life here. We’re very much outdoors in our huge nation. Not all of us are sitting inside on our computers.
It’s pretty simple: central London started becoming unaffordable in the early 2000’s as a place to live for younger people on typical incomes, and this antigravitational effect was turbocharged by the interest rate response to the banking crisis, which moved home-ownership in both central and suburban London from being a big ask, to might-as-well-be-on-the-Moon as far as most people are concerned.
You cannot chase millions of younger people out of the city and then be surprised twenty years later that there’s no demand for late night socialising.
Nailed it.
The situation was the same in London 30 years ago. Pubs shut at 11pm and you either needed to find a dive with a late licence or go to a club. And then a nightbus home. On weeknights, there was usually no option after 11pm. I too did my share of gate-crashing strangers house parties or getting taxis to pubs where someone once had a lock-in in the hope that it would happen again.
Funny thing is, this never struck me as a bad thing. Isn’t it all part of the fun when you are in your 20s?
I often wonder why Sadiq Khan isn’t chucked out of office on his *ss. But, then again, how did that creepy weirdo attain his position in the first place?
Still, pub life is strange in London: the only place my husband and I could get a drink at three in the afternoon was at a bar run and owned by an Australian. Except for us and the bartender, there was only one other patron – another American. Turns out he was playing Jean Valjean in “Les Miz” and got us free center loge tickets for the show.
Could it be because 15% (and growing) of London’s population is now Muslim and doesnt drink? I hear Tehran’s nightlife isnt that exciting either.
Then one would expect to see an increase in late night dessert parlours. This is what young people of that faith prefer to pubs, I’m told.
None of that either. Late night coffe and dessert? Forget ur. There’s precisely one one place in all of London that offers it which is the indispensable bar Italia
You only need look at what the council did to Fabric a few years back. Easily one of the most important nightlife institutions in the world for nearly 20 years and they did everything they could to eviscerate them, bankrupt them and put them out of business.
When the awkward question arose of what exactly London’s 24-hour economy consisted of, Lamé’s puzzling first suggestion was people “working for the NHS” — the implication being that, because it is still possible late at night to travel across the capital by ambulance.
That’s brilliant.
The usual reason some lady is in a well paid position doing nothing is usually …. .
Here in the Country the Boozers are open till midnight at weekends- 11 during the week.
Very much my experience when I lived there. In 1979!
I couldn’t help but notice, though, that my gay friends seemed to be doing just fine when it came to partying/drinking.
Don’t worry assisted suicide is on the way…
I lived in London for 10 years, from the beginning to the end of the 1990’s when it was a vastly more energetic and fun place than it is now. But even then it had a certain sense of being all mouth and no trousers. All lights and no action. Maybe it’s too spread out, it’s not dense by large city rankings. Soho now is bland. It’s just shops. Most of the city seems to be bland. The West End is Blackpool on Thames and the rest of the centre is dead. Maybe it got too middle class and expensive and the interesting young things moved away. There used to be a sense of greatness, a true world city that no longer exists. Sure, it still has a very metropolitan population but it’s very ‘meh’ compared to what it was. It is no New York. Not sure it is even an Istanbul. It’s lost its sense of self.
Excellent post…however the correct phrase is “all mouth and trousers”, the point being there’s not much inside the large trousers…
Or you could say, “all hat and no cattle,” if you were in Dallas.
All fur coat and no knickers.
Possibly connected to the fact that its demographics have changed dramatically in that time?
Must be an age thing. London’s shut down began with the millennium. Khan finished it off. People overseas often asked me if I lived in London. Good God no, I’d say. London’s not England. Only visit by helicopter and land on a decent hotel helipad. Exit in reverse. Ugh!
Hugely entertaining.
Alcohol is going out of fashion fast. Instagram is all about health and beauty, and they require toxin-free sleep. Even oldies now know booze will kill them.
Leave London.
It’s ugly, expensive, mismanaged, dirty, depressing, crime ridden.
As a writer you can work from anywhere.
Or give up drinking.
Why do you need to be paralytic every night until dawn?
Are you an alcoholic?
Quite
As difficult as it is to get a drink in London past 10:30 pm. It is even more difficult to get anything to eat. I can’t think of a single restaurant that stays open and serves people after 9 pm. It’s incredible virtually anywhere in North America and on the continent you can find somebody serving food (decent food I mean not kebabs) until at least midnight. The idea that the kitchen closes at nine or sometimes even earlier is mine blowing. It’s a bit depressing to Make sure that you’re at home by 8:30 pm in order to have a bite to eat
I’m not really sure why London has such a hard time with nights time culture I would be very interested to find out
I’ve noticed this – while looking for cafes that stayed open late, as it happens. Restaurants that shut at 8.30 pm? Is that even a restaurant? In France they don’t open till 7pm (at least where I went). I was indeed astonished that they don’t stay open till at least 10.
I understand what this man is saying. It’s dark and cold and the streets are empty and this is supposed to be a fun party city,so where’s the party? But is going out drinking really that much fun. In my 1960s childhood the image of adultness,the hip fun snazzy image of “being an adult” almost all focused on drinking. Pubs were mysterious places where you made magical connections with fabulous people.Well,there have been a lot of decades since then,changes in pub hours,changes in the whole drinks economy. It’s not Ena Sharpies and her two friends sipping a glass of stout all evening.
Even those local pubs that survive have to be Bars catering for a standing up crowd (pack more in) of free spending young uns.
I find it a bit sad that my generation go on about – the young ones now don’t know how to have fun,we were out there tanking it,dropping acid,shagging around,going into rehab,we really lived! I “grew up” or die I just grow old and I found out that pubs are just boring places full of boring people,-like myself,and that all the Adult Stuff is smoke and mirrors. If todays kids are wise enough to know that,good for them. I expect their Grannies told them. This guy is obviously a sad no mates who nobody is telling where the party is? Better go live in Paris,mate.
the idea that we’re all here paying extortionate rents & wallowing in filth because we want to be able to party 24/7 is hilarious.
Most of us are trapped here for work & desperately relieved that the noise, traffic & mess ends at some point each night so we can get some effing sleep.
I’m 64 now, and when pressed to travel back into the City for an evening, I try and educate them on either the torture, or impossibility of getting home again. Whilst enormously enthusiastic to criticise anything Khan initiates, the tube problem goes back to when I was 18. Tubes shut down about 11pm (hopeless) and Black Taxis refuse to go “sarf of the river” (living as I do in Wimbledon). You then have no choice but to agree a price with a foreign driver that sneaks up on you like an under cover Russian agent, offering you a ride – with no hire-and-reward insurance.
With the possible exception of the 90s and early noughties, London has never been a city like Berlin, Madrid, or New York where you can just waltz in and party party.
It is a cliquey place, and much of it operates behind closed doors. It is a case of working your way in, having a face that fits, knowing where your place sits within the British class system, having the right contacts, knowing the social codes, and finding your tribe.
understandably many people never quite learn to play that game very well, and for the most part they are left to make do with mediocre, and over priced venues like Tiger Tiger……if they are lucky they may still meet a partner, and escape the city before middle age seriously kicks in, and they spin off into orbit to merge into the bland grey backdrop that is the streets of London……..