Late night licensing on Lordship Lane

[Otto]

Thanks James B. - your fact is interesting - Especially as East Dulwich is classified as suburban according to the town planners or whatever you call them (the bureaucrat that would not let me build a roof garden)...perhaps this "classification" would come in handy to fight the application?

On the other hand, as an ex-new yorker, I do miss late hours in bars. In New York, a bar can have it's license revoked for excessive noise. The bar staff know when a customer should go home to prevent disturbance and will often escort customers out or refuse to serve them.

[tallulah71]

JohnL Wrote:

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> I don't stay out much beyond 1am - and LL is

> always pretty quiet when I go home (odten from the

> Bishop/EDT).

>

> Does it really get worse at 2am ?

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It's the late night drinking bars - kebab and wine etc which stay open all through the night. That's been there ever since i can remember. No complaints, but i don't live on the main road.

[Easties EL]

Lordship turns into a shit ole after 11pm

[TonyQuinn]

Madger, I suspect the battle has already been lost....unfortunately Dulwich is no longer the Dulwich we fell in love with way back. It has become, and this is a fact, Clapham. When the Clapham hordes, and their friends at Foxton's turned up, then this is the logical conclusion. I will write to the council, they do have a habit of actually acting on people's concerns strangely enough. But, it would prove only to be a short-term fix. Dulwich has irrevocably changed.

[Mark]

James Barber Wrote:

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> Local papers reported that since the changes in

> licensing laws emergency admissions to local

> hospitals related ot alocohol have risen by 500%.

Local papers also reported that local squirrels were addicted to crack, are there any official stats to back your statement up?

[expat]

>Local papers reported that since the changes in licensing laws emergency admissions to local hospitals related ot alocohol >have risen by 500%.

Any links for this? I can find no support for this.

[*Bob*]

Ohhhhhhh the Dulwich we fell in love with..

Which one is that? The one with the boarded-up windows and an occasional crack den or the one with the burgeoning restaurants and secretly-pleasing rocketing house prices?

Poor old ED.. resting in a state of idyllic stasis for 20 years - and then the Adventure bar arrives.

[TonyQuinn]

I didn't blame the Adventure Bar....not sure I could even identify it. The point I was trying to make is that ED is not a village anymore, that romanticism of the past, which may have been evident in my previous post, is not worth it. It's a new Dulwich now.

[*Bob*]

When was it a village again? I can't remember whether it was around 1100 or a little later.

[Keef]

East Dulwich has never been a village, or felt like a village.

Dulwich Village doesn't even feel like a village quite frankly.

Sean is right in saying that from the Palmerston down to Goose Green is not nice on Fri/Sat nights. I'm not sure how much underage drinking goes on though. I feel a bit old these days when I look at an 18 year old having a pint, but to be fair, it is legal, and I was one of them once upon a time.

Drugs? Not sure how much of it goes on, I'd imagine there is a fair bit of snorting going on, but to be fair, Tne Foresters used to be a well known place to get coke, The Bishop is not, so surely that is an improvement.

I'm amazed Stab & Wine doesn't get raided on a weekly basis though!

[*Bob*]

I think I've been to LL twice on a Friday / Saturday night, in all the years I've been here - in the same way that I avoid all sorts of other places on Fridays and Saturdays - and always have done.

It's always been like that, now it's just more like that. And before that it was doubtless just as unpleasant, only a different sort of unpleasant. If you think it's a sudden and recent development you must have been strolling around with a lampshade on your head for the last ten years.

It's not the drink and the drugs.. it's the people. Welcome to England 'on the weekend'.. appearing in your local high street since I can remember being old enough to get into a pub.

[Keef]

What *bob* said (mainly because he doesn't like that term)

[Jah Lush]

Nail on the head *Bob*.

[georgia]

I think it depends where you go on Lordship Lane! I don't think that all the bars between Goose Green and The Palmerston are full of under-age drinkers who behave anti-socially, even late at night. I can go out with my friends till 2am to the EDT or Bishop or Liquorish and have never seen any trouble on a Friday or Saturday and many of these bars have an over-21 policy anyway. There are plenty of people who enjoy a late-night drink at the weekend without resorting to fighting, vomitting in the street or whatever else people say they see on LL.

And East Dulwich is not a village, it is a surburb of a large city. If people want a village atmosphere, move out of London. I personally choose to live in East Dulwich because it's busy, lively and has a number of good bars and restaurants. If I wanted quiet, peaceful and pubs that closed at 11pm I would move away.

[Keef]

To be fair to the OP, I have seen fights outside the EDT whilst driving past quite late after playing gigs elsewhere, and I have definitely seen people being sick.

But, as Georgia says, this is London, and it's not even that much of a suburb really (Sidcup is a suburb), so it is going to be busy, and if you live on, or close to a High Street, you're going to get noise.

Having said that, I'm not sure I'd agree that a bar needs to open til gone 2am on a Sunday.

[david_carnell]

And it can much worse in those proper suburbs. You want to see grim, try Sutton and 1am on Sat or Sun morning.

ED is serene in comparison.

[TonyQuinn]

There's a name for serial wind-up merchants like yourself, who are 24/7 on forums like this.

[Brendan]

No really the outerlying suburbs are horrible for pissed up arseholes on the weekends when compared to inner london areas like ED. Croydon, Watford, Dartford etc. are practically no-go areas. East Dulwich has a bit of it and it is anoying but it could be a lot worse.

It could be Clapham.

[anonymous_third_part]

if you don't like living just off lordship lane because of bars that are open till 1am - then move away.

I chose not to live just off lordship lane as wherever there are bars and shops there is higher crime - there are loads of houses that you can move to. I don't see why the majority of people should be stopped from drinking.

pathetic nimbyism

[*Bob*]

The genie has been staggering drunkenly out of the vomit-lined bottle for some time now, looking for someone who might have spilled his pint.

[Reg Smeeton]

One of the most intimidating places I ever went on a Saturday night was posh Canterbury. East Dulwich at 10pm is bliss compared to almost anywhere I can think of that has a pulse. But why pander to a tiny minority of the local population by offering further opportunities for rowdy drunkenness in the small hours, especially before a school/weekday?

[edanna]

I think the point is ATP that people who have lived on these streets for years couldn't have anticipated these problems. These are their homes where they have chosen to bring up their families. In this situation, especially if you own your house, moving is a very big upheaval, not to mention that it costs tens of thousands of pounds.

[*Bob*]

edanna Wrote:

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not to

> mention that it costs tens of thousands of pounds.

Fortunately, their houses have doubled in value in the last decade - due in no small part to the proliferation of the very things that attract the unpleasant element. That should help-out with the move to Quietsville.

Why do people seem to assume it's some kind of unwritten law that things will always stay the same? Half the time they've forgotten that they aren't even the same as the person who bought the house two decades prior.

Things get better, things get worse, circumstances change, you weigh it up and make a decision. But if you've owned a house in ED for a long time at least you've got more options than most.

[madger]

Hi all - I wasn't expecting such a wide response to this thread... I really do want to emphasize that I'm not interested in bashing late night drinking for the sake of it, I know that I don't live in rural Kent, I love east dulwich - having made it my home since the 1990s - and I like staying out later at the weekends for a few pints. I'm not trying to criticize anyone else's way of life, I just feel that 2am on a sunday night is too late for a bar like the Adventure Bar to stay open. If it was people just having a nice time and leaving quietly, then great - but when i went past on Wednesday, coming back from town with a friend, it had just closed and the 4 people who had just been chucked out at closing were now settled in with tinnies at the bus stop, and one of the guys became very aggressive with us and, frankly, that is the sort of thing that annoys me about the bar, and I just don't think the company behind this bar takes enough responsibility. I am NOT saying let's all live in a quiet, tedious, stifling little neighbourhood and think piggy thoughts about other people having fun, I'm merely saying that there has - as others of you on this thread have also found - been a real explosion of 2am screaming and puking and fighting, and I just don't see why this should be something we're all just supposed to accept because we live in zone 2 London, albeit a very residential part.

And I don't think it is about things staying the same - this isn't some tedious, retrospective harking back to some apparently more 'golden time' when everyone fed the ducks and had a nice cup of tea and bun and went to bed at 9 with a small schooner of sherry, it's about saying - why should every area of London, as soon as it becomes 'popular' and mentioned in the property pages, slowly turn into the same old, boring, ubiquitous mix of late night bars that you get in Clapham and Battersea and places - it all starts to look the same.

Fundamentally, some bar owners based in Battersea - which is, i believe, where the Adventure Bar team are based, would like to make a fat lot more money by extending their late licensing to Thursdays and Sundays, and they, quite naturally, have no interest in whether there are people who live all around this bar who may be sleeping at 2.30am (which will be actual chucking out time on sundays if this license goes through), or have an early start on Monday morning.

I don't think this is about an 'either/or' response. It's not a question of 'should we have late night licensing or should we not'. I don't care about the abstract arguments for or against, and I'm very happy to make use of late licensing myself. But then I never spill out of a bar and shout my way down the street, outside people's homes, and puke in their gardens or pee or scream - and these are the problems. Our driveway now has a collection of empty beer cans EVERY SINGLE WEEKEND, accompanied by piss, which we have to clean up every single weekend. When I recently confronted a guy at about 2.45am who was peeing against our wall - and whose crashing around our garden had woken me up - he was so drunk he couldn't even speak. So he just kept pissing and then stumbled away. This has only started happening since the late licensing round here has become so much more prolific. Is it unreasonable of us to find this discouraging and to want to do something about it? I don't want to stop the late night drinking, but I want to stop the aftermath of it - and it may be that certain bars just aren't able to handle their clientele or their licensing conditions.

I am merely trying to explain what has started happening to those of us who have homes on or around the Lane, and asking any of you who agree to help.

I sincerely wish you all well. Madger.

[sophiesofa]

That's a wonderful post Madger. I'm going to write a letter of objection too.

Thanks for highlighting the issue.