The slow death of 24-hour London: how did the city get so sleepy?
When was the last time you did a proper all-nighter in London? With £7 pints, rising ticket prices, mass club closures, licensing restrictions, sluggish night buses, noise complaints and venue curfews, hunting down a place to party until sunrise feels like an increasingly impossible pursuit. And worse still, there’s not even anywhere left to grab a commiseratory bite to eat afterwards.
It’s no wonder that so many Londoners were puzzled and annoyed when the Mayor Sadiq Khan and the city’s night czar Amy Lamé both claimed that the capital was leading the way as a 24-hour economy.
In an interview with BBC Politics London, Lamé, who has been responsible for promoting and safeguarding the city’s nightlife alongside Khan since 2016, in exchange for a salary of £120,000 a year, insisted that she was “helping London thrive as a 24-hour city” after inheriting an “absolute mess” from previous mayor Boris Johnson.
Citing one example of
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