The last straw for residents confronted by encroaching revellers at Harbourside
A sign has gone up warning people cutting through a Harbourside housing development that it’s Residents Access Only — Private Property. The housing is called Invicta and it’s the last block of homes before you get to the harbour.
The picture shows residential housing, the harbour, and the ss Great Britain across the water. It doesn’t show the bar/restaurant Broken Dock just underneath the housing and the new Harbour Hub in the inlet, which specialises in frozen pineapple cocktails and fish and chips.
If you face away from the harbour though, you are confronted with even more night-time economy premises. The residential end of the Harbourside is being crowded out by those who spend millions in pubs, bars and restaurants.
Across the road there is a metro Tesco, a near-complete Brewdog pub next to a bowling alley that has late night drinking and outside seating, next to a Slug and Lettuce opposite an Ibis hotel with a bar on the ground floor, next to an independent cocktail bar, ice cream parlour, and a Pizza Express.
On the next block just past Millennium Square, there’s a Las Iguanas with 2-4-1 cocktails, the bar Steinbeck and Shaw and Pryzm, opposite Za Za Bazaar. Keep walking just a few more metres and you’ll find a whole quay of nightclubs including a Lloyds bar, Revolution de Cuba and others.
The effect of all these bars and nightclubs is not only the constant noise and the activity past the housing; residents at Invicta complain that “their properties are often used as toilets late at night” as well.
In fact, the Invicta block of housing is just one of the residential spots faced with the violent and harmful impact of the night-time economy.
The estimated “crime cost” of policing this area known as Canons Marsh, plus Park Street, and the city centre was £1,541,201 between May 2018 and May 2020. In terms of time, the Avon and Somerset police spent 5779 hours dealing with 1906 assaults, with 1305 occurring between Friday – Sunday.
The police also noted 91 sexual assaults and rapes at licensed premises, but with the proviso that sexual assaults are “massively under reported.”
Pryzm was the worst performing premise out of all the data.
To echo Mick Lynch, the RMT boss who has been providing some truths about who benefits from current policies, where does the money go?
Pryzm is part of a chain of nightclubs owned by Rekom UK. Their revenue is last estimated at over £69m and they have recovered so well from Covid that they are planning to open ten more nightclubs in the UK.
Local council tax payers fork out millions to counter the damage from the city centre’s nightlife while the administration also takes our money to support the same nightclubs.
There is such a cluster of NTE venues in this area that a cumulative impact zone has been set up to offer some protection to residents about new licensing. Recently, however, a new pub run by Brewdog was given permission to open. It will be open next to and across from at least six housing blocks, including social housing, and with young families and older residents.
In 2020, the council tried to remove this last protective area but failed. When the local democracy reporters covered the news, the cabinet member responsible at the time for promoting the night time economy, Nicola Beech, complained on Twitter (spelling aside):
She followed this up in the following reply talking about what she purported to be a damaging headline:
“Eh?!?! A legal hurdle restricting the number of new pubs, bars and clubs which can open up in Bristol disappears next month, sparking fears residents lives will be a “misery”
Here is what you see…
Pubs. Bars. Clubs. Fear. Misery. Residents”
And yet here we are with residents facing such externalities from the night-time economy that they have had to attempt their own protection. The Licensing Act so vaunted by Beech, failed to stop the opening of a new bar that will bring revellers even closer to housing.
The same councillor, now the Cabinet member for planning, Nicola Beech, said about that protection Invicta are attempting: “This is really, really disappointing and why I am always banging on about public access for the public!”
With support from Beech, a night-time economy lobbyist is being paid £50k a year from public funds to support the night time sector, and the local administration would like to see constraints removed from nightclubs as much as possible.
The police are paying millions every year to deal with the fall out of the night-time economy.
The anti-social behaviour doesn’t just occur at night-time. The picture below shows a man throwing up in a corner of where the new Brewdog pub will open up, and it’s quite clearly taken during the day. This is not an unusual sight for residents.
With the council supporting the nightclubs, all the residents have is a sign saying Residents Access Only.
Good luck to them.