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We must all oppose lap dancing club
• THE Archway Tavern (right) has installed new Archway-branded awnings above all the windows of the main pub, which seems to indicate that it is probably still going to be run as a separate business alongside the proposed sex club (Pub’s plans for erotic dancers drive neighbours up the pole, October 12).
However, one wonders about the potential interaction between the two groups of users sitting and smoking under the adjoining awnings. Family friendly it won’t be. I wonder how the Methodist church, with its family services and youth groups just opposite, feels about it?
One of the particularly unsavoury aspects of such pubs and clubs is their daytime use as much as the evening use. This club intends to start the drinking and stripping at 9am and run right through to 5am. Surely, those licensing hours should give our councillors pause for thought in an area famous for night-time drunk and disorderly behaviour and the recent murder of a driver from the cab office right opposite the sex club’s entrance.
Clubs like this, especially the “low-rent”, all-day ones, draw a seedy audience, which is why you often get a proliferation of illegal sex businesses around them. This is not what residents want for Archway’s future.
How on earth can our council seek to wave this through and dump on Archway yet again?
One also pauses for thought a little at the interactions between the young students who attend the upstairs music venue and the crowd of lechers they’ll have to walk past to get into it.
Regeneration this certainly isn’t and, as the pub is within the recently adopted supplementary planning document (SPD) area, one has to ask if the sex trade was what the SPD had in mind when it talked about the suitability of the area for “commercial leisure” uses.
It seems a poor show for Islington Council to spend £200,000 of public money and more than two years of consultation just to get a strip club to move to Archway.
It is imperative that residents write in to oppose this application before October 31. Should it go ahead we should all think about how we punish at the ballot box a council so careless about our area – because there is no law which forces sex clubs or 9am-5am drinking on councils. They can and should oppose this.
CHRIS BAILEY
Harberton Road, N19
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