Of all the problems facing central London, busking is unlikely to be high on anyone’s list. Yet, in the same week in which a man was filmed smoking crack cocaine on the Victoria Line, it is aspiring street musicians who have found themselves targeted by the authorities. According to multiple reports, buskers in Leicester Square – the heart of London’s West End – will be banned from performing from Thursday onwards.
The Times reports that national broadcaster Global Radio, which has offices next to Leicester Square, took Westminster City Council to court last month over buskers being allowed to perform in the square. Global told a judge that staff had been ‘unable to work’ because of the ‘overwhelming’ and ‘out of tune’ noise coming from street musicians with a ‘limited repertoire’. Global said staff had been required to take phone calls in cupboards. A court agreed, somewhat hyperbolically comparing the sound of street music to ‘psychological torture’.
The local council’s ban on Leicester Square buskers won’t surprise anyone who has observed London’s recent slide into joyless over-regulation. Indeed, Westminster City Council has played no small part in trying to bring the atmosphere of a dentist’s waiting room to the streets of the West End.
A prime example of this was its ‘Westminster After Dark’ project, which might as well have been written by the Taliban. Published in March, it called for bars in the city’s busiest entertainment district to host alcohol-free nights and to reduce the amount of noise they make. It also proposed dimming street lights in the West End to bring about ‘sensory friendly’ nights, whatever that means.
It’s not just bars and pubs that have been targeted by meddling council functionaries. In 2023, Greggs had to threaten Westminster with a three-day court hearing just to win the right to sell coffee and sausage rolls until 2am in Leicester Square. Westminster thought this would make it a ‘hot-spot for late-night disturbances and anti-social behaviour’. Clearly councillors want you to be not just sober and bored, but hungry, too.
Unsurprisingly, pubs and clubs have been shutting their doors at a rate of knots in London in recent years. Between 2001 and 2022, the number of pubs in the capital nearly halved, from 5,000 to 2,600. Around 300 have closed in the past three years alone. Clubs and bars have been similarly decimated, with an estimated 1,100 closing since 2021.
Of course, local councils aren’t solely to blame for the wipeout of London’s hospitality scene. Taxes (Westminster already imposes a ‘Late Night Levy’ on bars), energy costs, staff shortages and a less social, more abstemious younger generation have all played their part. But the authorities fear of noise complaints has certainly added to the puritanical atmosphere. Even George Orwell’s favourite pub, the Compton Arms in Islington, was threatened with closure in 2022 because of a handful of noise complaints.
Caving to bourgeois bores in Islington is bad enough, but it beggars belief in Leicester Square. Why did Global choose to have its offices in Leicester Square if it wants to have peace and quiet? The whole appeal of Soho and the West End is noise, people, activity and fun. It’s what tourists want when they visit London, and what Londoners want when they want to remind themselves that, despite the capital’s deficiencies, they still live in a great city. If it’s silence Global wants, it could have chosen almost any other commercial district. Or, better still, the countryside.
Sadly, yet again, the whingers have got their way. Innocent buskers will face a crackdown, but don’t expect anything to be done about crack-smoking Tube passengers. Crime is legalised, while harmless entertainment is stamped out.
London just about remains a vital, vibrant place. But that’s no thanks to the fun sponges in charge.
Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.
