The nightlife taskforce wants a rethink of how London handles sound at night, and the argument between a club that was there first and a flat that came later has no easy answer
Noise, Neighbours and Night-Time Sound
There is a basement on a side street off Great Eastern Street that has had music in it since the late nineties. For most of that time its neighbours were a printer, a taxi office and a warehouse. Nobody slept within a hundred yards.
The warehouse is now flats. Eleven of them. The first residents moved in about three years ago.
You can guess the rest.
How It Works Now
Under the present rules, a venue’s licence can be reviewed on the application of the council, the police or any other person. That includes a single resident. If the complaint is about noise, the council’s environmental health officers may also act separately, under the law on statutory nuisance.
A review can end with conditions: earlier closing, a noise limiter, no music after a certain hour. It can end with the licence being revoked.
The effect is that a venue which has operated for twenty-five years without trouble can find itself in front of a committee because one person who arrived recently is being kept awake.
That person is not unreasonable. They have a right to sleep. They may have a child. They paid a great deal for the flat and nobody told them what was underneath.
The venue is not unreasonable either. It is doing exactly what it has always done.
What the Taskforce Said
The nightlife taskforce that reported in January addressed this directly. Its report includes, among its headings, a call to rethink approaches to night-time sound.
The executive summary expands on it. It says that a more modern approach to managing sound in the city and legislative reform to noise enforcement can help nightlife.
The full report contains a line that suggests one of the reforms in mind. It refers to a requirement for a minimum of ten unrelated households. The extract I have does not give the full sentence, so I shall be careful. But the natural reading is that a noise complaint would need to come from a number of separate households before it could trigger formal action, and not from one.
If that is the proposal, it is a significant one.
The Case for a Threshold
Operators have wanted something like this for years.
Their argument is that the present system gives a veto to the most sensitive person in the vicinity. A venue can satisfy hundreds of neighbours and be undone by one. Some complainants, they say, are persistent to the point of obsession. Every complaint must be investigated. The cost in management time and legal fees is heavy even when nothing is upheld.
A threshold would mean that action follows only where there is a real, shared problem. Ten separate households being disturbed is evidence of a nuisance. One may be evidence of bad luck or thin walls.
The Case Against
The objection is equally strong, and I feel it.
Noise is not democratic. Sound from a basement club does not spread evenly. It travels through a particular wall into a particular flat. The person directly above may be suffering badly while nine neighbours hear nothing.
Under a threshold of ten, that person would have no remedy. They would be told that their sleep does not count because not enough others have lost theirs.
There are streets in Shoreditch with fewer than ten households on them.
And the law of nuisance has never worked by headcount. If I make your home unliveable, it is no defence that I have not troubled anyone else.
Who Was There First
The principle that has gained most ground in recent years is called agent of change. It says that whoever introduces the change is responsible for dealing with its effects.
If a developer builds flats next to an existing music venue, it is the developer who must pay for the soundproofing: of the flats, or the venue, or both. The venue should not be penalised for a conflict it did not create.
This has been part of national planning policy since 2018. City Hall published guidance on it early in the life of the old Night Czar’s office, encouraging planning, licensing and noise teams to work together so that new homes could co-exist with existing venues.
It is a sound idea. It has not solved the problem, for three reasons.
It applies to planning, not licensing. A developer can be made to insulate. But once residents move in, they keep their right to complain, and a licensing committee is not bound by who came first.
Insulation is only as good as its installation. I have been in new flats beside venues where the acoustic glazing was superb and the residents opened the windows in summer.
And it does not help where the flats are already built.
The Basement
Back to the side street.
The venue has spent, the owner tells me, something over forty thousand pounds on soundproofing since the flats were occupied. A floating floor. A limiter on the system. A lobby with two sets of doors. Staff on the pavement at closing time asking people to keep their voices down.
There is still one flat, at the back on the first floor, where the bass comes through. The resident has complained eleven times. He is, by the owner’s own account, perfectly civil. He works early shifts.
Nobody in this story is behaving badly. The developer, who is long gone, put up flats with a party wall that was never adequate. The council granted permission before agent of change was policy.
The venue’s licence is under review next month.
What Might Actually Help
I do not think a bare threshold is the answer. It trades one unfairness for another.
Better, it seems to me, would be a set of things together.
Agent of change written into licensing as well as planning, so that a committee must take account of who arrived first.
A duty on sellers and letting agents to tell buyers and tenants, in writing, that there is a licensed venue nearby. People would still move in. They could not say they had not known.
A fund for soundproofing where the developer cannot be made to pay. The first-floor flat could be fixed for a fraction of what a review costs everybody.
And mediation before enforcement. In my experience most residents do not want a venue closed. They want to sleep. Most operators do not want to keep anyone awake. They want to stay open. Those aims are not opposed.
The Deeper Problem
What has changed in Shoreditch is not the music. It is that people now live here.
The venues came because the district was empty at night. Their success made it desirable. Desirability brought flats. And the people in the flats, quite naturally, would like some quiet.
Every nightlife district goes through this. The ones that survive are those where somebody decides, deliberately, that both the flats and the venues will stay, and does the engineering to make it possible. The ones that do not end up as pleasant residential streets with a blue plaque where the club was.
The London Prat has been asked to keep the noise down since 1961 and addresses the subject in its UK satirical news on noise complaints and its British satirical news about moving next to a nightclub. Bohiney Magazine covers a country with enough room that nobody can hear anyone.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
