Adam Eldridge

Planning the night-time city

1. Introduction 2. Cities at Night 3. Visions of the Night-Time City 4. Party Cities 5. Binge Drinking Britain? 6. Regulating Consumption 7. Regulating Licensing 8. Planning and Managing the Night-Time City 9. Consumers 10. Night-Time Cities, Night-Time Futures

Hen parties: Bonding or brawling?

While the number of marriages taking place in Britain continues to decline, the hen party has become both an accepted marriage ritual and a source of controversy. In previous research we have found bar owners and town centre managers eager to discourage hen parties from their town centres and venues. Equally, in the popular press, the hen party is increasingly portrayed in comparable terms to the ‘stag do’; a night of drunken excess and embarrassing misdemeanours. This paper examines the hen party in terms of the articulation of gender, alcohol and public space. Through a wide-ranging literature survey and pilot interviews, we ask if the hen party exaggerates existing behaviours and practices, or whether it represents an entirely new, albeit limited, example of how women are using public space at night. Against the backdrop of a historical anxiety about women and public space, and growing concern about women and binge drinking, we examine the hen party as both a site of transgression, empowerment and female bonding, and as a unique opportunity to explore womens shifting attitudes to late-night culture.

Quieter, Safer, Cheaper: Planning for a more inclusive evening and night-time economy

The article reflects on planning for a more inclusive evening and night-time economy. The section focused on town and city centers in the evening and later into the night. It discusses the issues of lack of participation of certain groups within the population in entertainment and cultural activities.British town and city centres have undergone a partial revival in the last decade. Flagship projects, cultural regeneration and new investment has drawn both businesses and residents back to the city centre (Nathan & Urwin, 2005). Whilst the quality of many town centres has improved considerably during the daytime hours, concerns about their ambience in the evening and at night persist. This article is focused on town and city centres in the evening and later into the night. It addresses the issues of lack of participation of certain groups within the population in entertainment and cultural activities. Through qualitative research that questions the reasons for a lack of engagement and explores understandings of what a ‘night out’ constitutes, a critique emerges of current attitudes, policies and practices towards the evening and night-time economy. This critique unsettles the aims of contemporary practice with regard to the ‘entertainment offer’ in town centres and expectations that town centres should yield the highest economic returns on their leisure activities.

Gatekeeping and drinking cultures: how do we talk about drinking?

This paper examines the importance of gatekeepers in facilitating access to key informants. Using the author’s experience of working in alcohol-related research, the problems in gaining interviews with licensees, security staff and club and bar operators are discussed. However, in a departure from an understanding of gatekeepers as fixed, I argue that we need a more fluid and rhizomatic model. Rather than being fixed, it is argued that gatekeepers are far less stable than first appears and can shape, open up, inform and re-direct the research process along often surprising trajectories. Extending this point, in the second part of the paper, gatekeeping is explored in terms of discursive and disciplinary practices. I ask how discursive gatekeeping, and specifically debates about responsible and irresponsible drinking practices, have shaped and informed research in this area. Again, a more fluid understanding of gatekeeping is developed in order to work through the complex and often contradictory ways that knowledge is produced, reproduced and generated in critical work on drinking cultures.

Re-populating the Nighttime City: Hospitality and Gender

Recent work on the nighttime economy in the UK has shifted from a focus on the consequences of excessive drinking to a consideration of new and emerging social and cultural trends. This chapter, based on research conducted over a period of several years, examines some of the factors contributing to greater diversity at night. Focusing specifically on young people’s leisure and women, we argue that British cities at night are not homogenous spaces focused only around alcohol-related leisure activities. Whilst certain practices continue to dominate, other forms of leisure, work and shopping have grown in importance. Equally, there is a corresponding trend amongst younger people to entertain in the home before venturing out. These and other trends are used as evidence to argue that the city at night is a broad and vexed social space shaped as much by economics as by changing patterns, performances and structures of gender, age and class.