Can You Finish Your Drinks, Please?

Some cities are good at football. Some are renowned for architecture. Some are adept at turning out successful bands and artists. Nottingham, whether we like it or not, is known nationwide for – no, not toting pistols - drinking. And binge-drinking in particular.

Depending on who you talk to, we have anything from 350 to 400 licensed premises within staggering distance from the Square, many with late licenses to stop rioting at half eleven, and more people come here for that than our historical charms. As a matter of fact, Binge Britain was born right in the middle of Upper Parliament Street.

And perhaps it hasn’t done our pockets any harm. The drinks seem to be getting cheaper and cheaper and a sizeable chunk of the local workforce is gainfully employed in the licensing trade. Nottingham collectively hands more than a million quid over the bar in just a few short hours on a good night; the effect that the booze trade has had on the city is enormous. People across the country travel to Nottingham to experience our nightlife, and it's not just hag parties (although there are a lot of those).

So, what’s the problem? Well, obviously, binge-drinking has its downsides, both personal and social. There are myriad health risks, and not just to the liver and complexion. We’re more likely to get into risky situations, mainly through fighting, shagging, leaving your drink ‘unattended’, getting into a dodgy taxi or - that old chestnut - climbing up high scaffolding to retrieve big red balloons. And the services there to protect us are getting pretty overstretched. 

Women are perhaps most at risk, not least because they are the fastest-growing group of pissheads. Alcohol causes women's testosterone levels to rise, is linked to increasing risk of breast cancer, greater risk of sexual assault, and greater risk of holding the baby in more ways than one after a night of drunken ‘passion’. But according to Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo, 'many women drink too much simply because they have no idea how many alcohol units they are consuming.'

Ah, yes: units. A recent YouGov poll showed that although 82% of us claim to know what a unit of alcohol is, 77% don't know how many units are in a typical large glass of wine (it's about three), a third of us didn’t know that an average pint of beer, at around 4%, contains two units, and nearly two thirds didn’t know a double gin and tonic also contains two units. Certain that it is our ignorance which causes us to over-drink, the Know Your Limits campaign - the biggest UK alcohol awareness campaign to date - kicked off in the late spring with a series of adverts on TV, radio, billboards and in press.

This seems a bit, well, misguided to me. Unit-counting is the furthest thing from my mind when out on the lash. I do actually know I’m going over the recommended limit, but I also know that its not going to stop me having another cheeky half. Do they expect me to haul my dolled-up arse into town on a Saturday, to have just the three drinks before catching the tenth-to-last bus home? On yer bike. Campaigns like this won't work because its not that we don’t know about units; it’s that we just don’t care.

The other strand to the campaign may be more successful: appealing to vanity rather than scare-stories. Seen the adverts featuring guys getting ready to go out by ripping out their piercings and pissing on their shoes, and girls pouring wine down their tops and smearing sick through their hair?  We certainly DO care about having a good time, and looking like we're having a good time.

A piece of advice on the NHS Units site says it all; ‘A lime and soda looks exactly like a vodka, lime and soda.’ The government is advising us on how to make it look like we’re drinking, when we’re not.  It realises that we celebrate drinking for drinking’s sake. There is kudos in putting it away, so even if we do end up bloodied and vomiting, we can still get laid! After all, everyone else is doing it; we might still be the sexiest of the sickiest.

It seems that every initiative taken by the government runs into the brick wall of our ingrained desire to get kaylide. Nottingham's leaders, like those in other cities, are supposedly keen to inject a dose of ‘continental’ culture, where drinking is a pleasant side-activity and not the main event. How do they propose to do this? By offering us even more opportunities to get pissed. 24-hour licensing appeared to some as a win-win situation, as it would take the pressure off us to get hammered as quickly as possible, help the police by staggering chucking-out time and give us the opportunity to show that we could be good boys and girls and that we didn’t really want or mean to binge on alcohol.

Problem is, our drinking culture has always been: go out, drink ten pints, have a bag of chips, a fight, and get your leg over. To think that we can just steal a culture of pavement cafes in a country with our climate seems frighteningly naïve - for a start, we’d get pissed on, either by the rain or some meathead in a pastel Ben Sherman. In any case, market forces have already killed that idea stone dead; how many pubs do you know open all hours?

In the final analysis, and despite what your Nana might say, binge drinking is not a recent phenomenon that can be simply undone. Alan Sillitoe recorded this exact same culture half a century ago. The drinks may have been brown instead of blue, the women may have sat huddled in corners with halves of mild instead of flashing their tits outside Flares, and the pubs may have been run by middle-aged couples instead of faceless chains, but the urge to forget a rubbish week at work through alcohol is as strong as it’s always been. Mine's a vodka and lime. Just a single, mind.

The Birth of the Booze

Binge Drinking: why it’s all our fault, again

Nottingham has one of the highest concentrations of drinking venues in the UK, with over three hundred within a square mile of the city centre. According to the BBC, tens of thousands of drinkers go out of a Saturday night, spending over a million pounds. Nottingham has played a defining role in the drinking economy of England thanks to the proposal of a new nightclub/bar in 1996, Liberty’s.  

The liquor licensing laws in the UK at the time, was pretty much based on the principle of ‘need’. A magistrate could reject an application on the grounds that the area did not require or need another drinking establishment. The Home Office had considered ditching this principle a couple of times since the 1970s, because it was anti-competitive: the only thing that stopped them was fears for public safety. Thanks to a few alleged back-handers from the more-than-wealthy alcohol trade and a somewhat questionable Tory government the decision was made that the principle of need should no longer be a factor in licensing decisions.  

Notts Police were dead against the opening of Liberty’s, citing reams of statistics regarding drink-related public order problems, violence and hospital admittances. Thanks to a squadron of top-notch lawyers, however, Liberty’s license was granted. What had been a routine licensing application for a new bar became a landmark case which opened the floodgates for many more bars and clubs across the country, gaining licenses for empty banks, cinemas and even churches. Local authorities did not stand a chance at matching the legal teams and money that the drinks industry had at their disposal. 

When the police appealed against the licencing of Liberty’s, the judge turned them down, predicting that the place would make “a positive contribution to law and order and to the public good”. Liberty’s is currently shuttered up. The last time it was in the news, someone had bitten someone else’s nose off in there.