What’s a ‘Night Czar’ To Do?

Will the last bar to leave Hackney please turn out the lights? This week, London has been reverberating with the news that this East London borough, which has been at the heart of the city’s nightlife culture for several decades, will ban all new bars and clubs from staying open after midnight on weekends, and 11 p.m. on weekdays. In Hackney’s Shoreditch neighborhood, the borough has doubled the size of a zone in which future bar licenses will be refused.

This ruling surely won’t be unpopular with everyone—by London’s standards, this is a fairly densely populated area and there’s always the potential for friction between the customers of bars and clubs and nearby residents, even though these groups heavily overlap. But nightlife advocates see it as a death knell for the area’s nocturnal vibrancy. A backlash against the local borough council has ensued, with many pointing out that the borough’s own public consultancy found 73 percent of respondents opposed the law change. As one magazine covering London’s night scene put it, Hackney just voted to “kill its own nightlife.”