Client: Deltic Leisure
Project: Licence Appeal and Study of Kingston Town Centre NTE
What were MAKE asked to do?
Deltic Leisure is the largest operator of late-night venues in the UK. It has a reputation for investing in safety and security of its patrons and having thousands of happy customers through its doors weekly. However, the club experienced an incident where a man had managed to smuggle in a knife through a side entrance and, in an altercation, he wounded another customer in an unprovoked attack. Understandably the police took urgent action and appealed the venue’s licence.
However, given the otherwise well-run nature of the premises, and the comprehensive response that had been put in place after the incident, Deltic were concerned that they were being unfairly treated. MAKE were asked to undertake an interdependent assessment. The objective of this was to appraise both the new procedures and to map negative night-time behaviour across the town (such as noise, littering, urination) and identify which venues the patrons had visited.
How did MAKE do it?
We undertook covert internal and external evaluations of the premises over several nights, examining security, ID scanning, queue management, dispersal.
We mapped pedestrian flows and surveilled individuals who were causing problems in the town centre.
In addition, there were representations from some residents who were generally unhappy that there was a large nightclub in their vicinity, albeit the club had been in operation for several decades. We examined the veracity of their complaints.
What happened next?
The research concluded that the new management procedures were national best practice for the management of a large venue (although MAKE made a number of recommendations for small further improvements). The research also showed that frequently noise in the vicinity of the club was not from its own patrons but from those customers of other clubs who had walked to this end of town to catch buses and taxis as the club funded its own successful taxi-marshalled rank. We also identified that nights when residents had said they had been disturbed by noise from patrons of this club, it had been closed!
The police withdrew their objection and the licensing committee decided that, subject a small number of new conditions, that the club was fit for purpose and that it should be permitted to continue operating.
What unique value did MAKE bring to this project?
We mapped, for the first time in any study, the geographical patterns of night-time user behaviour and understood often surprising and hidden geographical patterns of visitor movement around a town or city at night.