By Emily Hawkins
Night czar Amy Lamé talks to CityAM about London’s nightlife facing lights out, the capital as a 24 hour city and feeling like a pandemic scapegoat.
“Gosh, how long have you got?” Lamé says with a laugh, when asked what the biggest challenge facing London’s night time economy is currently, in a bustling Soho coffee shop.
It makes sense the former-club-night organiser doesn’t know where to start – across the city, nightlife venues are struggling to keep their heads above water in the face of rising energy bills, labour shortages and cash-strapped clubbers.
While businesses are telling Lamé they were “just about able to survive Covid”, London’s best nights-out are “absolutely on the precipice now,” due to the absence of similar support, she says.
Lamé, who describes the current situation as “heartbreaking”, co-founded the club night Duckie at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in the 1990s, before taking her current role at City Hall in 2016.
Ahead of the fiscal statement on 17 November, Lamé is bullish on ministers to “step up”, with a wishlist including forcing energy producers to commit to a wider windfall tax, “dynamic” VISAs that would help firms plug worrying bouncer shortages, and further business rates relief support.
She is not alone in pleading for help, last week trade group UKHospitality warned that more than a third of venues fear going out of business by the end of the year.
After years hosting club nights and radio shows, on a Saturday night Lamé can now often be found on a ‘night surgery’, which involves “standing around night bus stops…talking to random people.”
Despite the gloomy headlines and battle cries from businesses, Lamé says the top thing she is asked for by punters, is for somewhere to buy a cup of tea at 2am.
What makes her job distinct from her contemporaries in Amsterdam and Paris is a “holistic” view of London’s midnight hours, Lamé says. As well as standing up for bars and pubs, she is also keen to see better pay and safety for night time workers, who are mostly NHS staff.
However, her tenure hasn’t all been friendly chats about tea. In 2018, one headline in music mag NME declared ‘what is the point of you?’ while a Change.org petition asking Sadiq Khan to remove Lame and reconsider the role garnered more than one thousand signatories during 2020.
Have those fraught relationships between disillusioned businesses and City Hall been repaired in the years since? “I would hope so,” says Lamé .
“I’ve always worked very closely with the industry,” she says. “People get stressed, people often look for scapegoats, someone to blame. I think we’ve moved on.”
For Londoners heading to bars and clubs, Lamé says a good or bad experience is often made by the journey itself. She called on the government to rectify its “shoddy” treatment of Transport for London after the pandemic, slamming the funding agreement as part of its “punishment” of the city.
Although London was a “resilient city,” and that would keep dancing on beyond this current crisis, Lamé said mass business failure in London could trigger a domino effect for the rest of the UK. She said the government’s rhetoric “does London down,” to the detriment of the whole country.
“Our tube trains are built in Yorkshire, the buses are built in Northern Ireland,” she says, with jobs around the country on the line should TfL continue to struggle.
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