Introduction

This chapter explores the contentious rise and rise of London's night-time economy (NTE) as a means of investigating the increasingly spatialised logic underpinning the techniques and rationales being deployed to foster a sensible drinking culture in the UK. As such, this chapter speaks directly to the third contention of this book as set out in Chapter Three. In this reading, the enterprise of governing alcohol lays bare particular governmental and non-governmental aspirations for urban environments and societies. However, this vision is distinctly ambiguous in that while certain urban agendas are being pursued throughalcohol (for example through ‘drink-led regeneration’), other urban aspirations are being achieved by regulating alcohol consumption and its harms. However, both ventures are predicated on a certain vision of the spatial and its impact on behaviour. Governing drinking is consequently inextricable from efforts to govern drink and drinkers. By extension, this also means that governing (and therefore theorising) drinking places – despite being an essential element of the alcohol control debate – has been omitted by sociological, anthropological, psychological, biomedical and psychiatric studies and has only recently started to be developed by geographers (Jayne et al 2006: 55, 2008a, 2008b), 2010; Kneale and French 2008).

To address this omission, this chapter will specifically focus on the example of London's NTE. With the nation's largest selection of bars, pubs and nightclubs, drinking has been a key strategic element in the city's broader economic successes (Elvins and Hadfield 2003; Roberts and Turner 2005; Hadfield 2006; Roberts et al 2006). Indeed, over the past two decades, the landscape of London's leisure industry has changed beyond all recognition and, with this, so have the consumption habits of those who frequent the city's diverse range of NTE venues. Above and beyond the critique of the commodification and homogenisation of the branded, commercialised night-time experience so maligned by some urban geographers and sociologists (see for example Chatterton and Hollands 2003; Hollands and Chatterton 2003), shifts in the city's drinking environments have come under attack for fundamentally altering existing codes of sanctioned behaviour and, in the process, creating urban ‘no-go areas’ (Roberts 2006). In conscious efforts to create the ‘24 hour city’ and foster a European-style café culture through licensing reform; drinking practices and the risks associated with them have been inevitably and irrevocably altered (Bianchini 1995; Montgomery 1995, 1997; Heath 1997).