The Night Tsar takes control

The Night Tsar’ is not a period thriller starring Tom Hiddleston, but rather something far more ambitious. The night tsar is going to save London’s nightlife single-handedly and raise an industry from its knees, away from the clutches of the London property machine. It’s a big task, but thankfully the woman appointed to the job seems to have a glowing CV: Amy Láme is a 45-year-old comedian.

To be fair to her, she did found a club night in Vauxhall back in 1995, and recently campaigned successfully against the Royal Vauxhall Tavern’s closure, but she’s hardly a stalwart of the industry. The whole appointment screams of a publicity stunt to me, and the effectiveness of a tsar to manage and communicate with such a wide range of stakeholders is ambitious at best. London’s nightclubs are declining rapidly, by 40% in the last 5 years alone. Recent closures include Plastic People in 2015, Dance Tunnel in June of this year and, most infamously of all, Fabric this September. So why is the industry declining so rapidly? Gentrification of London’s poorer areas, the traditional haunting ground for London’s best clubs, is largely to blame, with new property developers building flats right next to venues. The residents move into the property, and immediately complain about the noise, meaning the council forces the club to install noise insulation it can’t afford. Inevitably the club goes out of business. Sadiq Khan says he intends to introduce a law to force developers to pay for this instead of the clubs, but I think the presence of older, wealthier families will always produce friction when rubbing shoulders with nightlife; it’s only a matter of time before issues other than noise arise, and councils inevitably side with the middle class nuclear family. Another reason clubs are failing is that millennials simply don’t like them that much. Netflix is cheaper, sex is found on Tinder, and a healthy 8 hours of sleep followed by a kale smoothie is the on-trend way to live. How a tsar can entice the risk-averse, telly-and-duvet generation to spend £7 on a watery vodka cranberry every weekend is going to be the real challenge, even if the London property behemoth can be successfully restrained.