24 Hours of 24-Hour Licensing

There are many ways to make use of flexible opening hours. Nick Yates put in an entire day and night seeking out the best ways for you to take advantage

It’s 2am in a bar in East London’s Shoreditch. A DJ whips up the trendy crowd of revellers, bar staff glide around serving cocktails, and everyone’s having a good time.
It may be an unremarkable scene in itself, but the night is young for this particular venue, Sosho. (In March, after the time of writing, Sosho and The East Room closed indefinitely following a fire.) For its operator, the 2003 Licensing Act opened up the possibility of closing up whenever it liked, and on this particular night, that would be 6am.
Once secured, its 24-hour licence allowed it to choose the times at which it would serve booze. This flexibility was initially a controversial subject, but has turned out to be something of a damp squib if truth be told. Sosho is among a select bunch of pubs and bars around the country that have opted to get the licence, and an even more select bunch that uses it more than once in a blue moon to open beyond conventional hours.
However, 24-hour licensing has once again become a political football and there is a chance that the Act could either be reformed, or scrapped altogether. For one, the Crime and Security Bill that is currently before Parliament includes proposals for blanket bans on the sale of alcohol between 3am and 6am in problem areas. Then there’s the fact that the Conservatives have promised to end 24-hour drinking if the party gets in.
With the issue back in the news, I thought it was high time to find out the truth about what has been labelled a radical experiment with British drinking culture. Hitting the road early in the morning, I would spend 24 hours visiting those venues who have been making the most of their 24-hour licences. I wanted to ask them about their experiences and how they thought flexible opening could benefit other venues, while getting an insider’s experience myself. 

 10.00
The first of the day
My day began at The Railway Hotel in Blandford Forum, Dorset. Could this boozer really be the focal point for locals wanting to drink late into the night and early into the following morning?
It certainly doesn’t benefit from passing trade or a high street location. The SatNav led me off a winding country lane and up an unprepossessing back street nowhere near a railway – it was in the mid 1960s that the last train pulled into the station that gives the pub its name.
Nevertheless, since the Licensing Act was implemented on the stroke of midnight on 23 November 2005, licensee Nigel Jones has been regularly keeping his doors open at hours that would never have been possible under the old regime. This usually means starting the day at 10am and often serving until 4, 5 or 6am. On 11 distinct occasions, the freehouse has traded for 24 consecutive hours, until the beginning of the ‘next day’.
The incremental income, Jones believes, ‘has allowed us to survive a period when the costs of running a pub have just been going up and up’.
‘Why would you not want a fully flexible licence?’ he asks. ‘Why would you want to restrict your hours? Every licensee or pub chain should have applied. You can then adapt your hours to meet local needs.’
Local needs in The Railway Hotel’s case come from shift workers drinking when they knock off in the middle of the night; from sports fans wanting to catch live action from countries in different time zones from the UK; from anyone fancying a take-away from the kitchen, open whenever the bar is. Or from plain old late-night revellers in an area in which you won’t find too many nightclubs.
Jones has gone to extraordinary efforts to pull punters in and keep them entertained once inside. In the mid-morning to lunchtime slot I spent in The Railway Hotel, I noted gadgets and traditional games including two Sky channels (and countless screens), a digital jukebox, two fruit machines, a quiz machine, two pool tables, a retro videogames table, an electronic poker game, a shove ha’penny board and skittles.
In terms of live entertainment there is music on Fridays and Saturdays, and a beer festival every year. The combined package has made The Railway popular with scores of sports teams that use it as a base. The pool and darts players, as well as the quizzers and gamers, are all grateful that they don’t have to rush that last game before closing time.
It is all evidence of a clinical approach to making the most of every inch of the pub and every last minute of the day, and maintaining enough customers to serve.

14.00
It’s a knockout
From one community boozer to another, my 24-hour odyssey took me to London’s Clerkenwell next, where Fuller’s lease The City Pride, which uses its flexible licence to open for sports. Licensee Marco Baiardo usually closes at 2am, but extends this on average 10 times a year. On one of the biggest nights he can remember, 150 fans, each paying £5 for a ticket, packed the pub to capacity for the Ricky Hatton v. Floyd Mayweather boxing match in the early hours of 9 December 2007.
Baiardo says that The City Pride will typically take around £4,500 on such occasions. This excludes the entry charge, which goes towards employing a doorman (required by the licence after 2am), bar staff and pay-per-view TV.
A boxing nut himself, he is hoping for more high-profile bouts on the other side of the globe to create further knockout demand for late-night/early-morning openings. The football World Cup in South Africa, with its time difference of only a few hours, just won’t score in quite the same way.

‘We are no more likely to serve people

if they are lairy or drunk in the

small hours than at any other time’

19.00
Through the night
By now it was evening, so I made the short hop from The City Pride to The East Room and neighbouring Sosho. Owned by the Match Group, they would see me through to the end of my 24 hours.
The East Room keeps Londoners in cocktails until 3am at weekends – that is, once they have paid the £250 annual fee that this members’ club asks or if not a member, booked a table at the adjoining restaurant that is open to the paying public. Those not among this privileged list can listen to DJs next door until about 6am every Friday and Saturday.
It is not uncommon for a night-time event to overlap with The East Room opening for a private breakfast.
Match Group operations manager Stuart Langley stresses the importance of coordinating events in this way to ensure the tills can ring around the clock. And there is plenty of call for bars to cater for special events in the calendar, he adds.
‘If I want to have an Oscars party that doesn’t start until 1am and lasts until the morning, I can. Likewise, the US election kept us busy,’ Langley says.

At this point in the day clientele and atmosphere become more ‘interesting’. Who were these people in Sosho showing no signs of wanting to go home at 5am? And would they be allowed to fall around drunk and brawling like people plucked from the lurid nightmares of Daily Mail readers? I certainly didn’t see any trouble. While back in Dorset customers in The Railway Hotel at this hour would likely have been the shift workers winding down with a pint, Sosho’s came from more of a conventional nine to five set.
According to Langley, it’s a relatively new phenomenon: normal, well-behaved men and women will finish work in the early evening and not want to rush their night out. Maybe they’ll even go home first. ‘This may be us becoming more continental; there is a growing demand for quality things delivered late in the evening,’ he says. ‘And we are no more likely to serve people if they are lairy or drunk in the small hours than at any other time.’
Would that also apply to customers suffering from sleep deprivation? By this point I was struggling to focus on what Langley was saying. Thankfully, after another few hours, all 24 had passed. Making my way home, I reflected on how this controversial change to licensing policy has encouraged pub and bar operators to become more experiental with their trade. If the days of 24-hour licensing turn out to be numbered, there will be plenty who will look back on an era in which they were allowed to capitalise on customer demand in ways that would never otherwise have been possible.

Editorial feature from Imbibe Magazine – May/June 2010

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