Shaping the night: How licensing, social divisions and informal social controls mould the form and content of nightlife

Abstract

This paper considers licensing as a governmental tool for controlling crime and disorder in the night-time economy while simultaneously shaping that economy's social mores. Using recent contrasting examples from the English and Welsh experience – the regulation of live music events and lap dancing – the paper shows how licensing frameworks endorse particular social, cultural and economic forms while criminalizing, delegitimizing and suppressing others. Regulation of alcohol sales and entertainment (through licensing) sits in uneasy relationship with contemporary youth/young adult cultures and local leisure scenes. Young people's identities are constructed, in part, by and through their experiences as ‘consumers’ of nightlife. Within this context, heavy sessional alcohol consumption remains an important motif for young people; a culture of intoxication, combined with wider sources of social tension and fragmentation, governs the ‘life of night’ informally and in more subtle, pervasive and effective ways than formal dicta could hope to achieve.