Legless in Leeds

November 24 is D-Day, or Drink Day, for communities across England and Wales. This is the day when long-feared government moves to deregulate alcohol licensing come into force. Bar owners will be able to apply to open as late as they want, and control over licensing applications is passing from magistrates courts to local councils.

The government’s new libertarian alcohol policy may sit uneasily with its policies on high-density housing and mixed communities. Bars and housing are considered two of the essential ingredients of regeneration, but how do the two fit together at 3am? Add universities, another key element of regeneration success, with their students dedicated to the pursuit of drinking, and you could have a heady cocktail.

Ministers hope that ending the need to sup up by 11 o’clock will transform Britain’s drinkers into slowly sipping Mediterraneans. But critics argue that the British lager monster is a beast that won’t change its binge-drinking habits. They fear that deregulation will lead to a massive increase in the drink-related antisocial behaviour and disorder that already makes urban centres unattractive places to live for families. Their worries don’t stop there. The explosion of late-night drinking is hitting the suburbs too, as the Civic Trust will warn in research due to be published in the run-up to a national conference on the issue next week.

Regenerate has been to the leafy Leeds suburb of Headingley to investigate the consequences of an explosion in the area’s bar provision. Headingley is a Victorian suburb located two miles from Leeds city centre and between the campuses of the city’s two universities, Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan. Traditionally, the area has been regarded as the Hampstead of Leeds, the haunt of the city’s educated and well-heeled professional classes.

But the area has experienced a seismic demographic shift in recent years. Both universities have seen a massive increase in student numbers as the government has encouraged more and more teenagers to enter higher education. The growth in the student population has had a hugely positive impact on the economic health and vibrancy of Leeds. As one commentator recently put it: “The wealth of Surrey has been moved up to Leeds.” As a result, in Headingley the traditional mix of established residents and students has tilted towards the latter group, helping to generate much greater demand for bars and take-aways.

Within the past five years, Headingley ward councillor David Morton estimates that the capacity of the area’s bars has nearly tripled, fuelling alcohol-related antisocial behaviour. Increased student numbers have inevitably exacerbated the disruption caused by long-established features of Leeds student life – events like the “The Otley Run”, a pub crawl down the neighbourhood’s main thoroughfare.

Regenerate has spoken to some of the neighbourhood’s key players to find out whether Headingley is in the midst of regeneration or degeneration.

The developer

The evolution of Chris Ure’s company Ask Developments is a little parable of wider changes in the leisure industry. His firm’s Headingley office is next door to the Cottage Cinema, which used to be part of what was once a 20-strong family-owned chain of picture houses. After showing the final reel at the much loved but insufficiently frequented Headingley Lounge last year, Ure has closed his last cinema, freeing him up to concentrate on a more rapidly growing leisure field – bars.

In the last five years, Ure has opened three designer bars in Headingley town centre. To his opponents, Ure is the bête noire who has transformed the face of Headingley with his glass-fronted developments. But he is proud of his outlets: “We run a high-quality operation and we have won national awards.”

Ure argues that his opponents are not representative of broader Headingley opinion, pointing to the 10,000 to 15,000 patrons who pass through his bar restaurants every week. “We are getting a lot of stick off a small number of people. If you talk to a lot of councillors, they would love to have an entrepreneur coming and investing millions of pounds and providing a high-quality business in their ward.”

Economic benefits

Ure says he has invested £6-8m in the area in the last five years, transforming tatty town centre sites into stylish developments that bring people and money into the area. “The Headingley economy benefits, as do the local traders – probably on the back of my business. In terms of regeneration, it’s been phenomenal. Headingley has now developed into a very busy urban district centre in its own right.”

He says he has some sympathy for older residents: “If you are a 70-year-old pensioner and every other house in your street is occupied by students and they party because they are 18 years old then it’s not much fun.”

“Families have been forced out, but they have done very nicely,” he says, pointing to how many homeowners have cashed in on the area’s increased property values. He adds that the area has changed. “Few people live in Headingley because they think it’s a nice leafy area; they come because they like a busy urban environment.”

“There is a tendency to exaggerate what goes on in Headingley and to go on about the vomit and urinating,” he says. While there are instances of antisocial behaviour, the problems are nowhere near as bad as they are in a place like Bristol.

And he insists that the Licensing Act will not fuel binge drinking. “It’s right that people should be able to spend time in bars until early hours of the morning. There are already laws to stop people from behaving in a way that is drunk and disorderly, but they are not being enforced.”

He claims catering for binge drinkers is not good business sense, citing his own moves to develop what he describes as a “long-term, high-quality income stream”.

It’s responding to the desires of people living in the area. It makes business sense

“If you go down the cheap and cheerful route, you are appealing to the lowest common denominator which means chasing the short-term returns. There’s always a trade-off. You make a lot of money but in 10 weeks all your carpets are covered in puke and you have to do a refit. And people grow up and realise that the drink is cheap and horrible.”

The student

At 3 o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, Regenerate comes across its second pub crawl of the day in Headingley town centre. Stepping across the threshold of the Headingley Taps where pints and shots are £1.19 all Monday night, is a group of fresh-faced undergraduates, out to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Dressed up in farmers’ Tweeds, they are clearly not on the first drink of the day. “You have to be sorry for the residents who lived here before the students,” says one. Another chips in: “At the same time that you have to be sympathetic, drinking is what you come to university for, isn’t it?”

Erin McFeeley offers a more sober defence of Headingley’s student population, the rapid recent growth of which underlies the mounting concern about alcohol-related disorder in the area. “In Headingley, we are talking about a small area where there’s a high demand for the services that are there,” says the Leeds University Students Union communications officer.

“If there are problems, a lot of it is media hype, it’s not the worst place for it,” she says, adding that she finds Headingley town centre a lively place to go out at the weekend. She argues that incidents of bad behaviour are isolated and points to the absence of figures to show whether there is a problem in the neighbourhood.

The student union itself does not offer cut-price drinks promotions and advises its members not to drink excessively. But she does not believe that there should be a clamp-down on Headingley’s bars. “It’s a business and it’s responding to the desires of people living in the area. It makes business sense.”

The right to live as you choose

The two universities bring revenue and investment to the city, she points out, helping to underpin its recent boom. And she points to the extensive voluntary work done by the two universities. Equally, she argues that it is wrong for the council to clamp down on the conversion of family properties into homes in multiple occupation.

“We feel that it’s right that students have the right to live wherever they want to live.”

The resident

Lesley Jeffries’s cv doesn’t match that of a curtain-twitching killjoy. The middle-aged teacher is a member of the Green Party and was very active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament during the 1980s. She even enjoys a pint, picking out Yorkshire brewer Masham’s Black Sheep Bitter as her favourite tipple.

But the secretary of the Headingley Network of residents groups is angry about the way proliferating bars have ruined the quality of life in the area which she has lived in for 25 years.

During the evening, she says, urinating and vomiting in the street and even in front gardens has become commonplace in Headingley. “At just 7 o’clock tonight I saw a young man urinating in the street and his friend taking a picture of it on his mobile phone.” A side street that links the two main concentrations of bars has become known locally as “Vomit Alley”. The street is the location of the local primary school, where staff often have to clean up vomit from the playground. On the same streets, she says, cars are often bashed and their windows smashed by drunken youngsters. And the streets are often caked with litter from the local take-aways in the morning. “It’s a constant battle and it wears you down,” she says. Jeffries acknowledges that the area’s drinking problems are part of a wider shift that has seen families displaced for students and local shops replaced by take-aways.

‘My partner would move tomorrow, but I’m very committed to Headingley,’ she says, ‘I’m not going to be pushed out!’

Headaches in Headingley

So far, she says, the introduction of the Licensing Act has not resulted in the flood of late-night licence extensions that many feared. But then, many of the area’s bars already open late in Headingley, exploiting loopholes that allow premises to stay open if they offer dancing or food.

the only staggering here will be people going from one pub to anotheR

Lesley Jeffries

However, she says, all of the area’s bars have had to reapply for their licences to comply with the act, meaning more work for her network.

One of the “big flaws” of the act is that bar owners can appeal against refusal of their applications to the magistrates who, she says, have often taken a liberal line on the issue.

And she has short shrift for the government’s argument that staggered closing times will reduce rowdiness. “If they are staggering here, it will just be people staggering from one pub to another,” she says. The same low-level noise problems caused by people talking on the way home from the pub will be pushed into the early morning.

She says the explosion of bars has resulted from the council’s drive to turn Leeds into a 24-hour city. “You don’t want it to be all the time, everywhere – 24-hour living should be somewhere you go to rather than the place you are living in.’

The councillor

When he became ward councillor for Headingley, David Morton says 1200 people could drink in the area at any one time. Five years later, that figure has soared to 3200, becoming his number one headache in the process. “I didn’t come into politics to campaign against alcohol,” says the Liberal Democrat representative, “but it’s the main issue.”

“In terms of general footfall it causes a lot of disruption,” he says, giving as an example the group of around 25 clearly inebriated youngsters that he has just seen spill out of a local pub in the early evening, holding up traffic.

He argues that local councils, like Leeds, have few powers to thwart bar applications. Resisting planning applications for bars is hard because Planning Policy Statement 6 explicitly encourages investment in town centres – and Leeds council classes Headingley as such. And once a planning consent has been granted, it is difficult to veto the accompanying licensing application.

Also, while the new Licensing Act transfers licensing powers from magistrates courts to local councils, he complains that the government’s guidance prevents ward representatives from objecting to licensing applications unless specifically asked to do so by a constituent.

The costs of drunkenness – who pays?

He acknowledges that bar developments have brought capital investment into Headingley, but says they have also saddled the council with extra clean-up costs. “You could argue that the local authority ends up cross-subsidising bar operators,” he says.

It’s not just the council that is stretched as a result of the extra demand for services. He argues that the police turn a blind eye to the low-level, alcohol-related antisocial behaviour that takes place in Headingley. “The police would say it’s a quiet sector, people aren’t getting glassed. The biggest problem is mobile phone theft.”

In a big city like Leeds, the police have more pressing problems to worry about. “If you arrest 10 people at night, you are taking up a quarter of the city’s cell space,‘ he says.

And while bars bring investment to the neighbourhood, they are undermining its social fabric. He pins a large share of the blame for the closure of the local primary school on drink-related problems. “Parents have told me that they are not prepared to walk through vomit and broken glass and that they don’t want to take their children through that kind of thing,” he says. The area’s demographic shift becomes “a self-fulfilling prophecy” as established residents leave and young people take their places.

Many working-class communities complain that they are being pushed out as a result of gentrification resulting from regeneration. But it is rare for a predominantly middle-class community, like Headingley, to make the same complaint. But this is what’s happening, argues Morton. He fears that using drinking to regenerate the area’s public realm is creating an unsustainable community and wiping out its traditional character. “It’s not regeneration,” he says, “it’s obliteration.”