Taylor Swift’s Wembley gigs showed just how good London’s nightlife can be, but it’s all under threat from Nimbyism and over-regulation, says Emma Revell
I am a strong believer that one of the best ways to get to know someone is to see what niche topic they can speak about positively and passionately, uninterrupted, for five minutes. Everyone has something, maybe a few somethings. For me it is how good crowd control is coming out of Wembley stadium.
I won’t have a word said against it. Sure, it might take a while for you to get down Olympic Way. And if it’s raining, or you’ve just lost the League One play-off final after conceding a goal to Charlton in the 94th minute, it is a truly miserable walk. But I’d like to see you try and get upwards of 80,000 people out of a stadium and into two Tube stations without chaos or catastrophe week in, week out.
Last week, a couple of friends – and dozens of unsuspecting members of the public – got to enjoy my ramblings to that effect as we left the seventh night of Taylor Swift’s record-breaking eight-show run at the home of English football.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan even tweeted his thanks to the police and security staff for ensuring the gigs went off smoothly and to Taylor herself for performing more gigs in London than any other city, in a “huge boost to our city’s economy”.
There have been countless column inches dedicated to assessing the impact The Eras Tour is having on the economies of the cities Swift has visited. Back in May, Barclays claimed that her tour could boost spending by almost £1bn this year, with fans spending an average of £848 on tickets, travel, accommodation and outfits. Some economists have even argued that demand for hotels pushed prices up to such an extent that inflation did not fall as forecast.
But there’s a serious point here. While Swifties would probably have spent hundreds of hours, and indeed pounds, painstakingly threading friendship bracelets and glueing diamantes to cowboy boots without the support of the Mayor of London, fans visiting the capital for concerts or sporting events can only spend their money in our hotels, restaurants and entertainment venues if they are open for business.
Contrast our smooth exit from Wembley with the advice England football fans were given after the men’s team reached the final of the Euros a few weeks ago. Those attending the free screening at the O2 were warned to plan their journeys in advance because the night Tube doesn’t run on Sundays. If the game went to extra time and penalties, 15,000 fans were effectively told to choose between missing the crucial final minutes or getting stuck waiting for the night bus out of Greenwich Peninsula. Which is also what happened after Wembley hosted the Euros final, though it didn’t get much attention given the people storming the stadium and all that.
Yet even if you thought watching the game down the pub was a safer option, you wouldn’t have necessarily had an easier time of it.
As the Adam Smith Institute rightly points out in a recent report into London’s night-time economy, as well as generating £46bn for our economy, it also acts as a catalyst for secondary spending across transportation, security, and food services. Despite this, the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) has calculated that more than 3,000 pubs, bars, and nightclubs have closed across London since March 2020. They attribute this to spiralling energy costs, increased taxation and restrictive regulations, many of which are around noise, litter, and crowded streets. As if someone living in Soho had any right to be surprised that it was busy on a Saturday night.
Not all of this can be laid at the Mayor of London’s door. Many of the taxes the hospitality sector is struggling under are set at national level. But a man who seems determined to gaslight the capital into believing it is a 24-hour city should take some responsibility. Especially since his personally appointed “Night Czar” received a 40 per cent pay rise earlier this year, despite almost universal condemnation of her record over the last eight years. Clearly her contract doesn’t involve performance-related pay.
London is a global city and international artists are not going to stop coming here because it’s getting a little harder to get a pint after 11pm. But if we want visitors to truly enjoy their experience, to get the most out of their visit to the capital and not just pay us a flying visit, we need to look seriously at why it is that London is so quick to shut up shop.
Emma Revell is external affairs director at the Centre for Policy Studies