The Sekforde, which has served Clerkenwell since before the reign of Queen Victoria, may have its right to allow punters to stand outside and drink revoked by Islington Council after complaints from residents.
By Ben Gosling
The Sekforde, which has served Clerkenwell since before the reign of Queen Victoria, may have its right to allow punters to stand outside and drink revoked by Islington Council after complaints from residents.
The pub, on Sekforde Street in the south of the borough, stated on Instagram that the business is “under threat” from Islington Council’s licence review.
“They want to take away your right to stand outside and have a drink. They also want to halve the seating we have outside” read the post.
“With rising costs in national insurance, business rates, wages, food and drinks we will not be able to survive, and may join the rapidly growing number of pubs that will shut its [sic] doors forever”.
The Sekforde opened in 1829, and was refurbished in 2015, reopening in 2018. The pub subsequently won two awards from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) for restoration and sustainability.
The pub is within one of the council’s ‘cumulative impact areas’, which are “areas identified as having a high concentration of licensed premises”. According to Islington’s licensing policy for the 2023 to 2027 period, the borough has one of the highest densities of licensed premises in England.
The policy states that licence reviews will “be mainly reserved for circumstances where early warnings of concerns and the need for improvement have gone unheeded by the management of the licensed premises”.
Journalist and podcaster Lewis Goodall wrote on X/Twitter: “One of the best pubs in London struggling for survival because planning is stacked in favour of some powerful (likely old) NIMBYs. Everything that’s wrong with Britain”
“Staff here say they have the council coming in every week monitoring the noise. At a pub. Completely absurd”.
A representative of the pub said: “The licensing review process is very irregular, it’s supposed to come after warnings from the licensing department, which we did not receive. Noise is always the issue and was raised last time out.
“I think for some of the residents reasoning with them has gone. One particular neighbour is so obsessed that she made up a story in which the owner of a pub (aged 61) rang her doorbell and ran away. Although this may sound like a funny story, she actually called the police about it, and I had to answer questions from a police officer regarding the incident. This isn’t someone to be reasoned with.
“Clerkenwell is a very special area in my opinion, but even in London more broadly if you turn a corner and you find a pub as beautiful as ours on a Georgian street you feel as if you have stepped back in time. I am biased, but for me London without pubs is like The Tower of London without ravens. Legend has it that if the ravens ever leave the tower it will collapse, I think the same of pubs in this city.”
To support The Sekforde, email Islington Council ([email protected]) to oppose the changes before 17 December 2024.
Details of the application to review the licence, including the circumstances that led up to it and the recommended variations to the conditions, can be found in the application published here (see pages 4-10). The application will be scrutinised by the licensing committee early next year. Before then, anyone can give their views on the proposed variations by emailing [email protected] before 17th December.
