Potential flat occupants: don’t want to hear noise in the evening? Then don’t buy a flat next door to a live music venue!
Another venue at risk of closure
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
And perhaps don’t buy a flat in the very centre of Hackney just a few metres from Mare Street. How quiet can residents expect it to be?
Many, if not most, of the people who end up living there will be tenants. And increasingly people don’t have the luxury of choice enjoyed by many of us in the past.
This is true.
If your tenancy agreement is coming to an end and your landlord won’t renew, thus requiring you to vacate, you’ll only have a limited amount of time to gather up your stuff and find an alternative. While still going to work to keep your job. And IME every flat that gets advertised gets snapped-up immediately anyway. Even the slummy ones.
You don’t usually have any time at all to be choosy.
The last time I went to the Moth Club, on my short stroll back to my car, I passed a block of flats set well back from the road where someone was playing music probably louder than the gig is just been to! It it not a quiet area!
Sounds like the council needs to insist on a clause in the planning permission that means that residents of the new flats can’t complain. That’s what happened in Milton Keynes when houses were built near to the stables.
Took them a couple of years of intense legal wrangling and an awful lot of money in legal fees etc. to get that outcome.
Even with the Council very much on their side from the off.
The Duke Of Wellington at Shoreham took pre emptive action.
https://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Article/2023/06/02/The-Duke-of-Wellington-Shoreham-granted-noise-abatement-notice/
I’m still mourning the almost wholesale pulling down of the various lidos and non-league football grounds in East London 40/50 years ago.
If Larkswood, often described as the best lido of them all, still existed it would now be printing its own money.
I’m just amazed that Redbridge Council is actually building a *new* lido in Valentine’s Park, near where the old one was. Although I’ve not lived round there in some years, the original still holds a place in my heart.
Sadly this sort of thing happens all the time. I’ve worked in and around the licenced trade most of my working life and many people buy a house very close to a pub and then complain about noise from entertainment or disturbance as people leave the pub. What did they expect?
They probably only visited the property before purchase during the day and didn’t notice.
Locals still talk fondly of the couple who bought a house backing on to the The British Legion in Bramford and then complained about the noise from the bingo on a Saturday night.
@Skirky
People shouting “house” must have got very old, very fast
House music?
Imagine buying a flat in the vicinity of, say, Twickenham, Lords, or Stamford Bridge, and then moaning about the crowds on the street before a game.
I suspect there are people who do that.
There’s a place in Falmouth called Event Square. Purpose built to house the National Maritime Museum at one end and surrounded by shops, cafes and restaurants on the other three sides, with apartments above.
The Square houses the Falmouth Week evening gigs, the Food Festival, and the Oyster Festival.
Except of course it doesn’t. Because the new apartment owners complained of the noise on the rare occasions an event was on and so it remains empty and unused.
Let me imagine they are mostly migrants from that Lahndahn, rather than lucky locals.
Noise complaints are part of the problem to be sure but, as in the case of the Moon Club in Cardiff (which closed its doors this week) the bald truth is that the punters don’t turn up in sufficient numbers to grass roots gigs to enable these venues to pay the exorbitant rents of city centre spots. These days I’ve noticed that there are quite large queues for DJs but the audience for actual bands has shrunk. Pubs dont put on bands because of the expense (cheaper to get one person and a deck). People say ‘how are we going to find the next U2 ir Coldplay?’ Perhaps the uncomfortable truth is that they’re no longer there.
Talking about exorbitant rents that small venues struggle to pay, it strikes me as likely that if the venues were better supported and potentially making a profit, the greedy commercial landlords would then charge them even more. Lose-lose.
Back when I first started going to gigs, the venues were all individually-owned pubs and clubs or were publicly-owned facilities.
Now public houses are mostly owned by Pubcos and any publicly-owned halls of decent size are franchised to event companies. Hence more fingers in the pie.
Actually, pre-COVID, there was a thriving scene hereabouts for bands in certain Pubco pubs. The 4-piece covers band a pal of mine played in could get a paid Friday night and Saturday night gig most weeks. Free entry for the punters because the bands attracted more drinkers when the music was free.
Of course that circuit was almost entirely cover bands, because yer typical pub punter is mostly drawn to music they are familiar with. Landlords don’t generally book original-material bands because they know that punters don’t come to those gigs. Sad but true.
COVID killed that scene and it never came back. Tougher licensing requirements have not helped but were inevitable, really. The way a lot of small gigs were run was very sloppy and the behaviour of some patrons could be pretty vile, left unchecked.
A cynic might surmise that if you were to effect a land-grab, you could get a conveniently placed neighbour or three to complain about noise from a struggling venue. When the venue is shut down you could swoop in and convert the building into flats for a knockdown price. All hypothetical of course, m’lud.