A public nuisance

Published 02 July 2009

Observations on boozing in public

Two policemen approach a group of picnickers in the shade of the National Gallery on a summer’s day in London. “Aww. This is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen,” says one officer. “I’m sorry, though, you can’t drink here.” A picnicker clutching a can of lager asks why. “Because it’s a controlled-drinking zone,” says the policeman, and continues, “so put it away so I can’t see it.” There is a pause. Another picnicker proffers a teacup.

“Can we put it in this?” Another pause. “Yes,” says the officer, satisfied with the rightness of it all. And so the increasingly bizarre way that public space is regulated achieves its apotheosis: drink what you wish, as long as it is from bone china.

Ostensibly, this was one of the strangest moments in a two-day experiment to test the way in which London’s public spaces are regulated, undertaken by Blueprint magazine and the Manifesto Club: here was a member of the police force telling a group of people to hide an act from no one apart from himself. But this is just a twist on a standard practice, as Robbed by the Police, a document published by the Manifesto Club, makes clear. There are now more than 700 zones in England and Wales where police can seize alcohol from anyone within it. Drinking is not banned, but it is an offence to refuse an instruction by the police to stop drinking. Or, as it would appear, to decant it into the kind of receptacle one could hand a vicar.

In some regards, this was the most coherent response the team encountered in its two days of drinking, eating and playing. We discovered that most of what we read as uniform public space is not, but this ambiguity does not make these spaces any more permissive. At More London, outside London City Hall, we discovered that the private owners – yes, the area around the capital’s assembly is privately owned – look upon the very definition of the public as a problem. The simple act of putting out a deckchair started a long conversation among four More London employees.

The security guards we encountered tended to fall back on pretty basic instincts. At More London, when the team turned up with hampers and deckchairs, they were permitted to play to their hearts’ content within an adjacent recess, designed to invoke the democratic forms of a Greek agora. Yet when they wore hooded tops, they were informed by a security guard that they could not play football and that “this whole grey area is private”. The guard confided that he thought it a ridiculous rule, but if we did not move “the corporate shots will get on the phone to Boris and he’ll pass a stupid law”. In Paternoster Square our team was moved on twice as quickly wearing hooded tops as without them.

Meanwhile, regulators are coercing us to behave in a certain way in their spaces. Estate managers of More London are trying to animate the site with the odd bit of opera. In Trafalgar Square we will soon be asked to watch people sitting on a plinth. Certainly, it is the more pleasant side of proscribing what we do in the city, but it is the other half of the same ethos of coercion. As Dolan Cummings, director of the Manifesto Club, has put it, “Something is lost when our understanding of the public is reduced to consumers on best behaviour.”

Tim Abrahams is associate editor of Blueprint. Blueprint’s Public issue is out on 3 July

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1 comment from readers

Drew Byrne
15 August 2009 at 17:18

Aww—what an attractive researcher you have there; she doesn’t look like the sort of girl who’d like to be arrested, photographed, DNA-recorded and fingerprinted at the local nick because she’s actually breaking the law in a public place by “drinking in a public place which is a controlled-drinking zone”. And, of course, she’s not the sort of target the police are really after where this rather draconian law is concerned—or is she? Drinking from an open can of beer is definitely banned in these areas––“de facto”, as the saying goes; it is also an offence to “appear” to drink out of an “apparent” can of beer while loitering on a park bench and not provide evidence of your identity as you do so. Not a classic “lawful” offence, of course, but a twisting, tricky, accusative offence, whereby you may be arrested if you don’t wish to comply in this exact manner: to cooperate fully, quickly, meekly, and/or be arrested. As it is a serious legal matter where anyone who has been fined for drinking in a public place and have been subsequently fined again for drinking in a public place, subsequently re-offend in a Controlled Drinking Zone. Thus this proven “drunken bum” can be swiftly put in prison for several months at least, for continuing to drink in a public place when subsequently caught at it.

This is no, “One law for the winos and one law for the law abiding sober fellows drinking in the park,” this is simply a draconian, “criminal law” designed to prevent anybody whom the police do not particularly like from drinking in these areas. Which (I consider) is an attack on an individual’s freedom of expression under the Human Rights Act. Of course, don’t take my word for it: ask a qualified rights lawyer about the implications in practice of this particular public behaviour law. After all, he’s not obliged to mislead you over the actual legal niceties of this law, like the police seem to do occasionally with those whom they apparently casually attempt to entrap over it. Whatever happened here in modern Britain if you have to pass such a draconian law in all its petty, minor details against an aspect of freedom of expression? Namely (in this case), to be prevented from drinking alcohol in public wherever and whenever you wish to, so long as you remain sober and orderly while you do so.