I first met Amy Lamé just over eight years ago on a building site at the back of Denmark Street. She was wearing a hard hat and a hi-vis jacket, which I think were not her usual accessories. Also, it was morning, causing me to wonder if Night Czars were supposed to be awake at that time of day. However, if Lamé was finding her circumstances unfamiliar, she rose to the challenge with aplomb.
As construction workers crashed and banged, she made a spirited case for why the gutting of a historic quarter of London’s popular music culture was not an act of profiteering vandalism but a piece of creative work in progress. “This is incredibly exciting,” she told a showbiz camera crew. “London’s changing and having a Night Czar is part of that.”
Sadiq Khan, elected Mayor for the first time only seven months earlier, was still on his political honeymoon and had only just added Lamé to his team. Hers was a novel appointment: for one thing, although equivalent roles existed in other cities, London had never before had a senior regional government figure covering all aspects of the capital’s economic and social life between the hours of 6pm and 6am (as opposed to the other way round); for another, Lamé’s employment history was primarily in entertainment, not the often technical and prosaic world of public policy.
True, she had acquired a strong understanding of aspects of planning from her successful campaign to save the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, a long-established gay venue, from closure. What, though, did her new job involve? And how well did she end up doing it?
For some time before she stood down from it in October, such questions had been being loudly asked by Conservative opponents of Mayor Khan with pejorative rhetorical intent. In the run-up to May’s mayoral election, long-running Tory and rightwing media claims that Lamé was collecting a fat salary for doing little useful work as London’s night time industries struggled became a centrepiece of Tory candidate Susan Hall’s attack repertoire.
That was incongruous, inconsistent and unfair: incongruous, because Hall’s purse-lipped suburban persona made her an unlikely champion of nocturnal hedonism; inconsistent, because Tories are often the first to demand tighter controls over entertainment venues if their voters’ sleep is being disturbed (Westminster Labour’s historic borough win in 2022 owed much to their successful stealing of those Conservative clothes); unfair, because it declined to recognise either the nature of Lamé’s responsibilities or the effort she put into discharging them.
Her role combined championing, convening and lobbying, including within City Hall itself, with the goal of, in the GLA website’s words, “putting the Mayor’s Vision for London as a 24-hour city into action”. This covered everything from licensing to street safety (particularly for women) to night time workers’ pay and conditions to ensuring that the needs of the night time economy, in its many forms, were recognised in planning policy.
The latter took a specific form with the “agent of change” principles embedded in Khan’s new London Plan, the master blueprint for the capital’s evolution, which placed obligations on property developers to ensure that new projects, typically housing schemes, did not end up posing a threat to the operations of adjacent cultural venues.
This was usually about residents being unhappy about noise from, say, a next door cinema – as in the case of the Curzon in Mayfair – coming through their walls. “Agent of change” policies make developers responsible for provide adequate soundproofing, so that the problem does not arise. Also and equally, they place obligations on new, noise-generating venues to soundproof themselves.
Of itself, this wasn’t new: Boris Johnson recognised the principle and, shortly before his mayoralty came to an end, said its was established in his London Plan. But Khan promised to strengthen the measures, with Lamé, informed by her Royal Vauxhall Tavern campaign, backing them strongly. They eventually took the form of London Plan policy D13 (which also covers other noise-generating and potential “nuisance” issues).
Lamé also devised a night time enterprise zone programme, awarding grants of £130,000 to be spent in specific areas to help local hospitality and culture sectors, beginning with Walthamstow High Street in 2019 and expanding in 2022 to Bromley, Vauxhall and Woolwich. The intervening period was, of course, that of the pandemic, with its devastating effects on restaurants, pubs, clubs, theatres, cinemas and live music venues.
There was a very real sense in which Covid obliged Lamé and her City Hall team to start their work afresh. An acceleration of the working from home trend, with its notably big Friday night effects, had shifted the night time landscape. Recovery has occurred, but not without a struggle. It was convenient for some to pin blame for this on Lamé, as if her City Hall position came with extraordinary powers to save struggling businesses for closure.
Less was heard about those she helped to succeed through persuasion and advocacy at City Hall and borough level alike. The chair of a north London theatre that recently moved to a new, purpose-built home described her and her support as “wonderful”. Khan’s planning deputy, Jules Pipe, describes himself as “a real fan” of Amy” and her as “a genuinely lovely person”.
There is no doubt in his mind that “she was really passionate about the future of the creative industries and in particular fighting for the survival of venues under threat”. Although she has now left City Hall, Pipe says he still regards her as, so to speak, part of the family, “continuing to promote London as the global capital it is for cultural and creative industries”.
Just as Amy Lamé cannot be held responsible for London nightlife businesses failing, neither can she be awarded undue credit for those new ones that have started and prospered. But it is worth reflecting on what has changed on and around Denmark Street since that December day in 2016 – not only more guitar shops than before and the draw of the Outernet, but new, state-of-the-art live music venues too. That success has had many authors, but the Night Czar played her part.
Photo of Amy Lamé from GLA website.
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