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Why pick on pub that’s a haven amid club culture?
• AT a recent meeting for Clerkenwell residents over the impact of late-night drinking, the Clerkenwell Safer Neighbourhoods team detailed how it is limited in its ability to deal with the many clusters of late-night bars and clubs that have grown so disproportionately in our area.
Despite the team’s efforts – and its work until late at night is appreciated – there was little real enforcement it was capable of doing, its hands being tied without the real support of the council and its licensing committees. It was a dispiriting meeting.
I have to admit to my surprise when Councillor George Allan stood up from the audience and declared that we have a right to be unhappy with the current situation, that it was up to residents to pressure the licensing committee, Cllr Allan apparently being well aware of its failings. Meanwhile, he told us he was already coaching residents in how to call two bars up for review to the committee.
What a hero to the neighbourhood.
But it did seem strange that he forgot to mention to residents that he is a member of the very licensing committee he denigrated. Not just a member but also chair of one of the sub-committees.
What he did admit, if as briefly as he could, was that it may well have been himself, when a younger councillor, who encouraged the introduction of the late-night bars that now cause such trouble.
It seemed rather odd for the person who caused the mess to stand among the residents and create an “us against them” situation while facing down the hard-working members of the Safer Neighbourhoods team who try to limit the damage he and the Lib Dem council have created.
Meanwhile, I find it frustrating as a resident that one of the two licensed premises in the area he is attacking isn’t one of the clubs such as Dust, where police have been called in the last few months over a shooting outside, but the nearby Jerusalem Tavern. This small building is the only pub owned by an independent brewery and it is also this year’s Good Beer Guide city pub of the year.
Closed at weekends and after 11pm on week nights, with no music, this is exactly the kind of pub we should be encouraging in the area to replace the late-night club culture that is causing such problems and attracting drugs and violence.
Instead, it is the real ale pub that Cllr Allan wishes to attack, leaving the Safer Neighbourhoods team to clean up his council’s mess everywhere else.
ALASTAIR HARPER
EC1
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