London's pubs are dying. Can a new law save them?

Dear Londoners — the sun is (kind of) shining, the Lionesses won the Euros, and the government has announced it’s trying to save pubs from closing down: not bad, as far as Mondays go. Read on to find out what, exactly, those pub-saving plans consist of, as well as recommendations for the best things to see, do and eat this week.

Big story: The government is putting forward new plans to save pubs from noise complaints. Will they save the capital’s nightlife? 

Top line: A new law is in the works that could helpfully stop the capital pubs from facing closure from spurious noise complaints. But is it enough to fix London’s broken licensing system?

Background: As we’ve covered before at The Londoner, London’s pubs are in a tooth and nail fight to survive against often unfounded complaints to local councils, usually about supposed excess noise. In February, we revealed that one in every 100 pubs in the capital was unable to open late or faced closure as a result of noise or nuisance complaints in the last year alone (these include “faint giggles” and speculation that later opening hours could lead to “honking” cars).

The new law: On Saturday, the government announced it would be amending national licensing laws to try and alleviate the burdens on pubs, clubs, bars and restaurants. The changes (while still vague) will reportedly standardise the rules across the country, fast track license approval for new venues looking to open and give existing venues “greater protection” from noise complaints (including by placing burdens for soundproofing on developers who build next to longstanding venues rather on the venues themselves). 

The flaws: The problem with licensing noise complaints is two-fold: there are complaints made against a venue to try and shut it down, which these laws should hopefully mitigate, and there are complaints lodged when somewhere is trying to extend its operating hours. Often the latter is why so many pubs now are forced to close early; the very act of trying to get a later licence could, at best, see them slapped with dozens of unsurvivable conditions.

To try and deal with that issue, the new plans contain proposals for “hospitality zones” where councils can designate an area for fast track approvals for al fresco dining, late night licences or converting empty retail spots into hospitality venues. But their establishment and implementation will be left up to local authorities, which have a spotty track record in defending hospitality spots.

What does this mean for London?: The move coincides with a mayoral push for more al fresco dining in the capital. That included the announcement of the Summer Streets programme, which will see some roads in Brixton, Leyton, Shoreditch and West End given fast-tracked support for al-fresco dining. Whether they succeed in the next few months may be the best test as to whether the government’s new plans could have a wider effect in the capital.

Your news briefing

💸 Yet more vindication of our reporting on the capital’s wealth flight came out over the weekend. Back in May, we were the first outlet to raise questions about a series of reports produced by a wealth advisory firm called Henley & Partners that suggested thousands of millionaires had left the capital each year — but seemed to be based on data sourced from LinkedIn. Since then, multiple pieces of research have backed up our reporting. The most recent came over the weekend, as a new report from Tax Policy Associates found dozens more holes in the methodology of Henley & Partner’s research, which led to the damning conclusion that the firm’s reports “can’t be trusted”. 

🍴Readers who have spent any amount of time on social media will likely have come across the chefs at Fallow — whose videos of cooking tips or skits about high-end restaurants, regularly rack up tens of millions of views. Out of curiosity, we took a look through their most recent financial accounts, and found that the money in their profit and loss reserves in 2023 almost tripled in that year to £1.8mn. What else happened that year? Almost all of Fallow’s earliest viral videos first started popping up on social media.

🎶 A choir concert in Holborn was dramatically shut down when a bishop in a dressing gown came on stage and accused the group of creating a “terrible racket”. The 360-odd people in the audience were shocked when Jonathan Baker, the bishop of Fulham, told them “you are in my house, can you leave it now, please”, before forcing them to exit the venue. 

🚨 Members of Reform are celebrating this morning after they won a council by-election in Bromley, snatching the seat from the Conservatives. It brings the party’s total number of councillors in London to four — though, importantly, this is the first one that wasn’t a defection by an already elected Tory councillor. Does this mean there’s a landslide on the horizon for Farage’s party in London? Well, as we explained last week, while the few outer boroughs that have traditionally voted Tory are prime targets for the upstart right-wing party, the party has struggled to make progress in byelections elsewhere in the capital. 

🏳️‍⚧️ More than 100,000 lined the streets of the capital on Saturday to celebrate Trans+ pride, turning it into the single biggest such event in the world. The turnout is seen as a rebuff to a recent Supreme Court decision in April that said the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex.

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If you missed it

• On Saturday, we chronicled the saga of the Scarlett Letters, a radical East London bookshop that was met with fanfare from the capital’s activist communities but was forced to close within the year, thanks to a mixture of clogged toilets, midnight occupations and Google researchers. 
• On Thursday, we reported on how a series of late night South American bars managed to resuscitate Dalston’s nightlife scene. In a city drowning in constant headlines about dying nightlife, what can we learn from this story of revival?
• On Wednesday, we used a decade of TfL data to track how the capital’s buses have been getting slower, and finding out why. We also built this free tool so you can see if your bus route is getting slower, and by how much.

Wining and dining

With endless offerings and non-stop openings, we all know that deciding where to eat and drink in the capital can be fraught. We want to make it easy — so every week we’ll give you our insider guide to the city’s best spots. 

One perfect meal: Meaning “little by little”, the phrase “lai rai” has also become a shorthand for a spur-of-the-moment catch-up with friends, the kind of late-afternoon hang-outs that linger late into the night. It’s no surprise, then, that Peckham’s buzzy new Vietnamese restaurant named itself after the concept: with unfussy decor and street-food-inspired small-plates, the place is an ode to the joys of informality. 

During the day, it’s a coffee bar and bánh mì joint, while in the evenings it turns into cocktails and dishes of papaya jellyfish salad and betel-leaf beef. Decked out in sunshine yellow and bright, ớt hiểm red, it’s already become an Instagram favourite — and so, inevitably, it’s become somewhat difficult to get a table. But once you’re in, sharing plates of prawn lollies and coconut mussels with your friends, pints of ice-cold lager cooling your palms, it’s worth the wait.

One perfect drink: In the spirit of celebrating the Lionessess’ seismic second Euros triumph, we thought we’d let you in on a little secret: what could be the best pub in London to watch the football in. Now, regurgitated clickbait articles have dedicated thousands of words to this fundamental question, but they almost always circulate the same dozen or so pubs, all of which are aggressively mediocre or permanently rammed.

So instead, try the King’s Arms in Kennington — and more specifically, try its pub garden. The reasons for this are three-fold: 1) Its pints are all around £5. 2) The garden is full of massive booths, tables and about a dozen flatscreen TVs. 3) It has been blessed by the football gods, as at least one Londoner writer has watched every single one of the greatest comeback wins of the last year perched in its garden. 

Our favourite reads

How our water went to shit — Oliver Bullough, Prospect Magazine

If you want to understand how Thames Water ended up being so dysfunctional, journalist Oliver Bullough has broken down the tragic history of the UK’s privatised water industry and how it left waterways full of sewage. 

Perilously Close to Death, a Mother Continues Her Hunger Strike — Mostafa Al-A’sar, New Lines Magazine

In this piece for New Lines Magazine, Egyptian journalist Mostafa Al-A’sar tells the story of Laila Soueif, a mother who has been on hunger strike since last September over the decade-long detention by the Egyptian government of her British citizen son over the sharing of a Facebook post critical of the government.

To Do List

1. You have a little under a month left to see The Estate, an assured and electrifying debut from writer Shaan Sahota. The play follows Angad, a British-Sikh MP who’s set his sights on becoming leader of the opposition after his boss unexpectedly resigns in ignominy. By turns vicious, savvy and charming, Adeel Akhtar’s dazzling portrayal of Angad is one of the year’s best performances.
2. The unhinged masterpieces of bad-taste supremo John Waters are to be screened as part of the Garden Cinema’s Divine Trash season. Outrageous, perverse and filthy in every sense of the word, the season includes screenings of bonafide queer classics Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Desperate Living. 

From the archive 

If working-class 20th century London had a human embodiment, it might’ve been Bob Hoskins. Raised in Finsbury Park, the virtuoso actor worked as a porter, lorry driver, plumber and window cleaner before appearing on the big screen, experiences that undoubtedly contributed to the pathos and complexity he brought to his roles. Here, he rails against the early 1980s corporate redevelopment of Waterloo and South Bank: “the whole thing’s up for grabs”. It’s a speech that’s still startlingly relevant today.