Tuesday, August 14, 2007

All Quiet on the Charlton Front...

...or not as the case may be.

There's a club near my house, well I think it's a club. It tends to host Country & Western music nights on Fridays and what seems to be Weddings or Birthdays on a Saturday (I've heard Hi Ho Silver Lining way too many times now, it must be a tradition, or an old charter, or something).

All's usually fine, they wrap up at for midnight on the Saturday and they're usually pretty good about it too.

However last Saturday they were going on until about 12.25am. Then add in the noise of people leaving and it was about 12:45am until it quietened down. I wasn't too happy, I had an early start the next day.

I'm tempted to complain but it seems that my only official route is to lodge a request to investigate their license, which is really rather serious, and not called for yet in my opinion. Perhaps a quick anonymous letter to them asking them to stick with their licensing limits, which I believe say that they must stop at midnight.

I'll see how they go over the next few weeks. Saturday's DJ was particularly rubbish, I wasn't listening for that long and I heard way too many fluffed links between records. Hopefully it was a one off.

3 comments:

DDKK said...

I'm not sure how it works for licensed premises, but normally you should phone the council's environmental health dept. They should have out of hours cover for noise complaints especially at the weekend. For example in Lewisham I believe they have officers on duty till about 2am on Fri and Sat. If possible, they will come and investigate immediately. For private parties etc, this usually means they knock on the door and ask them to keep the noise down and in extreme cases have powers to confiscate hi-fi equipment. Since it's a licensed premises I would advise you to speak to the landlord. There's no need to make a big thing of it; be reasonable and polite, just explain that you start work early etc etc, and then leave it at that. Don't threaten anything - the landlord will be well aware of your powers as a local resident to complain to the licensing board.
I have used both the methods described with success in the past. Good luck!

Anonymous said...

You could just lodge a complain about unreasonable noise with Greenwich council's Environmental health department. there are informal and formal action they can take to curb any nuisance. This doesn't have to involve thier licence, but may do as licencing and noise complaints are often dealt with in the same department.

Unknown said...

I wouldn't bother with the Council noise people. I've complained to them on many occaisions about various noisey neighbours and unattended burglar alarms, and the most they have ever offered to do is to write a letter or 'monitor' the situation.