'It's all about health': Young people swap nightclubs for pottery events and morning runs
Pubs in peril, music and dance venues closing at unprecedented rate as the cost of living crisis continues to push punters indoors into sober settings over the weekend, as John Ray reports
As a nation, we’re not going out. Not nearly enough, anyway.
Not if you depend upon Britain’s night-time economy to make a living.
I’m in London’s West End. It’s eleven o’clock and I’m wondering where all the party people have gone.
Aside from a few busy streets in the centre of Soho, it is quiet. Too quiet.
Ask around, and I soon discover, things aren’t quite what they were.
‘’I’m heading home,’’ says one young woman. ‘’I have to be up at 6.30am - to go running.’’
‘’Since Covid, everything’s gone online,’’ offers another. ‘’Going out to dinner or to dance, it’s never recovered.’’
The official figures back up the notion we’ve become a society that collectively longs for its bed rather than the bar.
Over the past four years, almost a third of this country’s nightclubs have closed.
Last year alone, as many as 150 live music venues fell silent, while 500 pubs called last orders for the final time.
It used to be a rite of passage. When I turned 18, sometime in the last century, I couldn’t wait to head, legally, to the local.
Those clubbing years were formative, even if the lesson was that I was hardly a mover and shaker on the dance floor.
And then there were all the bands I saw on tiny stages that defined their musical era.
But times have changed. Somewhere between Covid and the cost of living crisis, a generation – or at least a significant portion of it – has lost the habit of going out out.
I asked around a few younger colleagues in the ITV News office, and just now, pottery is the new rock and roll. Yes, you read that right. Pottery.
In Camden Town - synonymous in my mind with Amy Winehouse and a whole gang of London hipsters - I watch young people learning to chuck clay at a spinning wheel and to fashion a little jug or what looks like ashtray.
Though of course, they’re far too heath conscious to actually smoke.
‘’For me it’s all about health,’’ says Shae. He’s 18 and out with a group of teenage mates.
‘’I don’t really feel the need to go the pub.’’
His friend Rafi agrees.
‘’With the internet you can be entertained at home. That’s enough.’’
He reminds me it’s no longer essential to leave your sofa to meet and chat up a boy or girlfriend. That’s done on your phone as well.
Ella, who’s 17, says personal security is another factor. ‘’Who wants to go out and get your drink spiked?’’ she asks.
But I can’t help thinking they’re missing out on an important part of being young.
So last Saturday, I headed to Nottingham, to a good old-fashioned disco.
It’s hot and heaving and the tunes are cheese fashioned from solid gold.
I am surrounded by mums and dads, a few grannies and grandads too, partying like it’s 1999 all over again.
But it is also just four in the afternoon. This is an event called Dayfever. The idea is to drink, to dance, and to get home in time for cocoa, slippers and News at Ten.
I ask Sabrina, who’s 47, whether her son approves.
‘’No,’’ she laughs. ‘’He begged me not to come, but I don’t care.’’
It’s all a bit topsy-turvy. Teenagers disapproving of their parents’ social life. Youngsters making pottery nick-nacks.
But in the club they’re all to too busy dancing to think about such weighty matters.
Actress Vicky McClure, whose husband Jonny Owen is the brains behind Dayfever, appears on stage; hyperactive mistress of revels, to lead the merriment.
I ask her if she feels sorry for today’s young people.
‘’I do,’’ she says. ‘’There is nothing like being in the moment. A song comes on. It ignites a memory, a moment in time and you’re just in it. I think it’s important.’’
And by eight o’clock the aging ravers will be on their way home.
Is this how the big night out ends?
It’s a sobering thought.
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