eleven - The night-time economy: exploring tensions between agents of control

Summary

Town centres are no longer spaces merely restricted to daytime consumption. Indeed, Britain's night-time economy (NTE) is now worth many millions of pounds annually, and is defined as the attraction of mainly young, upwardly mobile people at night to city centre entertainment ‘hot spots’ such as bars, clubs, restaurants, casinos, pool and snooker halls, cinemas, and cafes to spend significant sums of money on a range of leisure and social activities (Hobbs et al, 2003). That said, NTE is centred on excessive alcohol consumption in ‘vertical drinking’ venues with limited seating facilities (Monaghan, 2002; House of Commons and ODPM, 2003). Recent changes associated with the shift from the industrial to post-industrial city – for example, the emergence of flexible working hours, public/private sector partnerships, business entrepreneurship, and a focus on the provision of services as opposed to manufacturing, coupled with a re-orientation of urban governance – has meant that the late-night leisure and entertainment industry now employs vast numbers of workers both enabling and encouraging revellers to eat, drink, and socialise until the early hours on most days of the week (Chatterton, 2002; Hobbs et al, 2003).

While the government's active encouragement of night-time economic growth has, on the one hand, facilitated urban regeneration schemes and been beneficial to local economy, employers, employees and consumers, various social order problems are attached to such changes. These include an increase in late-night alcohol-related violence, rowdiness, noise, drug dealing, vandalism, street fouling and litter dropping, and other offences (Roberts, 2004). In response to such disorder, to regenerate city centres more widely and make the public apparently ‘feel safer’ in such spaces, strategies such as closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras and their operators have been implemented by various public/private sector authorities, alongside other measures such as Pubwatch and Shopwatch (Norris & Armstrong, 1999). The latter schemes effectively link together various agents of social control such as retail security guards, pub/club door staff, police officers, and CCTV operatives over an intelligence-driven, real-time radio network. Pubwatch also involves the training and registering of city centre door staff by the local authority, with premises paying £200 for the radio system.