Proposed ‘hospitality zones’ for alfresco dining are little more than top-down attempts at vibrancy which will move nightlife away from where it’s already thriving into sterile Boxpark clones, says Tom Jones
It is a Saturday night. Your exhaustion from a week of open-plan purgatory – the train delays, the Slack pings, the passive-aggressive tone of your line manager – has finally subsided.
You’ve only seen your girlfriend once this week, for a rushed lunch when she spent most of the time talking about how much she is dreading her next Teams call.
So you decide to take her down to the ‘hospitality zone’ for some tasteful banter and an alfresco Beavertown in a plastic cup outside what used to be a Debenhams. She has never dated anyone she has less respect for.
The menu is a QR code. You have trouble accessing it, because one of the burgers is called the ‘Dirty Mother Clucker’, and so your phone flags it as sensitive content and asks you to provide video ID.
She will leave you, soon, for a man who is lost and cruel and without virtue, but who is a stranger to the vapid centre. You both know it. You sigh into your loaded fries as she looks away.
These ‘hospitality zones’ will be used as little more than an opportunity to remove hospitality outwith, to areas deemed more suitable to everyone except the people using them.
The government has announced a series of reforms aimed at revitalising Britain’s high streets by slashing red tape for the hospitality sector. Central to the initiative is a new pilot scheme of ‘hospitality zones’, starting in London, which will fast-track approval for alfresco dining, longer opening hours and street events. These areas will be chosen by the Mayor and councils in collaboration with businesses and the local community.
These zones are part of a broader deregulatory push, much of which is to be welcomed. The new National Licensing Policy Framework aims to simplify and unify the process for securing planning permission and licences, replacing the current patchwork of local rules that often delay or discourage small business openings.
Sanitised and sterile
In practice, the proposed ‘hospitality zones’ will do little more than replicate the sanitised, sterile aesthetic of places like Boxpark. But, given they will be instituted by governments as top-down attempts at vibrancy that mistake branding for culture and command-and-control spatial planning for economic revival, likely even worse.
Mayors, Councils and ‘the local community’ – whose complaints about noise from pre-existing lively night-time businesses are a huge reason the hospitality zones are being mooted – have little incentive to choose places where drinkers or hospitality businesses currently are. Politicians will want the political kudos that comes with ‘urban renewal’, Councils want derelict shopfronts filled and business rates flowing again and ‘local communities’ will want to put the businesses as far from residential areas as possible. These ‘hospitality zones’ will be used as little more than an opportunity to remove hospitality outwith, to areas deemed more suitable to everyone except the people using them.
London already has plenty of places to eat, drink, and socialise – or at least, it did, before successive governments slowly strangled them with tax, regulation, and the dead weight of the Nimby veto. These businesses aren’t struggling because they lack access to designated ‘hospitality zones’, they’re struggling because of the punishing fixed costs of business rates, VAT, National Insurance and alcohol duty. As Luke Johnson, entrepreneur and former chairman of Pizza Express and Gail’s, said on Twitter; “These headlines from govt are displacement activity while they annihilate the hospitality business with costs.”
In fact, displacement is exactly the right word – although perhaps in a less charitable way than Johnson uses it. That’s because fast-tracking permissions for alfresco dining, extended hours and street events in new areas does nothing for venues already fighting to survive elsewhere. In fact, it is a significant hinderance to their continued survival, giving a competitive advantage to new businesses. Displacement activity, perhaps, may actually mean a drive to relocate hospitality away from where it thrives and into zones deemed more palatable to planners, politicians, and nearby residents.
Cheers.
Tom Jones writes at The Potemkin Village Idiot Substack