Cricketers Pub Loses Licence

When a pub or club is closed because it's become associated with crime or any form of antisocial behaviour, I always feel a little glum. Does shutting down such places change the behaviour of the patrons who gave it its bad reputation or simply move them and the problems they cause for others somewhere else? I'm afraid I think it's bound to be the latter. I felt just the same way when the Palace Pavilion was unplugged a while back, and that was despite gathering a petition against it and giving testimony in court. 

That said, I won't be alone in being thankful that The Cricketers is losing its licence. You didn't have to walk past it too often in recent years, especially in the warmer months, to form a firmly bad impression of the place. It's easy to imagine that many people have taken lengthy detours to avoid it at certain times of day and night, and that cannot be OK. 

All told, then, I'm glad that on 19 January the Council's licensing sub-committee has revoked the pub's licence with immediate effect. A letter sent to Councillor Rathbone (kindly forwarded to me by the Clapton Pond Neighbourhood Action Group) says that the police and the Council's pollution team provided evidence of "frequent" breaches of licensing conditions and "public nuisance" being caused. 

The danger of tolerating that kind of stuff is that it suggests no one objects - or is prepared to make known that they object - to their becoming fixed features of the neighbourhood. Closing down venues where it flourishes at least demonstrates that that is not the case.   

Comments

[yvonne cole]

what pubs don,t people hang around outside to have a drink, plus smoking as u cannot smoke inside, as a matter of fact there is loads of pubs in london which attracts people who r quite loud and they do not get closed down, this happened because its a black thing thats all and u know it.

[steve]

spot on, Yvonne.
The Council my be placating a few people who bought nearby flats at the height of the bubble - and knew that they were buying near a pub. I'm sorry if they're in negative equity. But this is the third pub closure in lower Clapton in recent years, and the sociability of the neighbourhood is suffering.

[Andy]

Yvonne, Steve, i'm afraid you don't know what you're talking about - it's closure has nothing to do with colour. So i'm presuming you feel that the cricketers was somehow part of the black community? Then should black people have been proud of having a pub that was known far and wide for being a crack den, had 'patrons' stood outside at all hours selling drugs, fighting and urinating in nearby doorways and did nothing to curb this behaviour despite repeated requests from resident, as synonymous with the identity of black culture and community? I can think of far better representations of black culture than a dodgy hole of a pub that scared local residents into having to endure lengthy weekend curfews for fear of walking past gangs of dealers on the way to get a sunday paper. If that's what you refer to as the sociability of an area then you are even more misinformed than your messages suggest. It enrages me when people relegate a serious, complex and debilitating local issue into the race card - its unfair and inaccurate - that part of hackney was becoming a no-go area entirely because of that front of a pub. I do however partially agree with Dave Hill in his concern re whether closing a pub going to address the underlying issues of drug dealing and social deprivation? probably not, but at least local, elderly residents and families can have a semblance of normality at weekends. Government and culture need to change society, not the acts of the police, but broad change starts on a local level and this small closure has already had a drastic and positive effect on the local area.

[Steve]

Andy,
you say, variously, that I'm misinformed and don't know what I'm talking about. On the former, your view is the result of a misinterpretation of what I said; on the latter I'll trust my 20 years of living in Clapton.
The notion of a "black community" - or any community based on identity - is specious and hides very real social differences that neo-liberalism likes to pretend don't exist - class being foremost.
As to the pub - I don't doubt that a few gangsters might have taken over the place for their drugs racket, and that's a complex issue, albeit largely a demand-side one. Closing the Cricketers will just displace the problem: the gangsters will move on, and cause distress somewhere else. Meanwhile, Clapton loses another public space - how's that going to help community relations?

[Andy]

Hi Steve

Thanks for your comment and let me firstly apologise if i offended you, it was remiss of me to bundle yours and Yvonne's points into one, despite being united in being spurious they were divergent in point - as you might gather from my post, i am a local resident of the pub area, and witnessed first-hand the appalling effect the place had on resident's lives, and the notion that its closure was anything to do with race completely enraged me, as did your reductive and unhelpful comment about negative equity. As it happens we're not in negative equity thanks, and as a long time london resident i know all about living close to pubs and enduring anti-social behaviour - it's par for the course if you are not wealthy. Unfortunately, this place was not even slightly a pub and if you really have lived here for 20 years you'd know that. Nobody should have had to endure that level of anti-social behaviour and persistent indifference to the actual, non-specious local community and getting it closed was a real triumph for the idea of local action and people overcoming their fright to get a blight removed. Without wishing to get into an argument with you, and this is said respectfully, the idea that any kind of community, or almost abstract concept of a 'sociability of an area' suffering from the closure of a dive like the cricketers is bordering on surrealist and if you are not misinformed then you are at least fantastical in this assertion. My allusion to the black community was based solely on wanting to expose the ignorance and fallibility of Yvonne's initial statement of the pub's closure being a 'black thing' - i wanted to make it clear that if this closure was in any way race-related, it would have to operate on the assumption that some people considered the cricketers to be related to black culture or community, and if so, then it was a pretty poor beacon of such culture. I agree with you that closing a pub does not an underlying issue remedy, and this is a more complicated political, cultural or maybe even historical issue to confront. However, i am convinced that broad, societal change takes place in small, incremental steps that eventually conjoin - to see old people and young families from different classes and cultures come together to improve their local area, and make it clear that people who have no respect either for residents or the local area have no place ruining it is surely something that improves both the community and its relations - and please don’t insult your obvious intelligence by stating that cricketers was even remotely a public place - the only patrons of the place had nothing to do with clapton, no intention of improving the area or facilitating community relations and you know it.