Piya Piya nightclub told to close earlier

Published: 26 February 2010
by RÓISÍN GADELRAB

NEIGHBOURS of a City Road nightclub can sleep once more after the owners were ordered to shut an hour early.

Exhausted residents collected a long list of complaints against Finsbury’s Piya Piya to convince councillors the club’s hours must be curbed.

Speaking after the licence review hearing at Islington Town Hall on Monday, a victorious Yvonne MacAlpine, of Lexington Apartments, opposite Piya Piya, said: “It’s a satisfactory outcome where they can continue to operate as a restaurant. The residents will be happy with that.”

Ms MacAlpine earlier told the hearing how she had suffered sleepless nights and was once woken in the early hours of Christmas morning by noise from the club.

She said: “It was silent night, except for Piya Piya. They were the one and only club open.”

Residents said they had little cause for concern while the venue operated as a restaurant, but once it turned into a club, antisocial behaviour such as noise, fights and littering escalated.

Although Islington Police had few complaints, the strength of residents’ concerns swayed the licensing panel. Much was made of a mass brawl outside the club on January 29.

Sgt Robin Clark, of Islington Police’s licensing team, said: “The venue runs without causing us problems. There’s not a lot of recorded crime.”

But the panel’s Councillor George Allan and Cllr Ruth Polling, representing residents, questioned police records.

Sgt Clark said: “The call handling systems have had problems, however, I’ve done searches on postcodes, grid squares and street names. Yes, we’re not perfect, there will be calls that got lost in the system.” He said he was “very confident” that the information he had collected was accurate.

Cllr Polling said: “It’s clear that commitments made to residents about keeping noise down are routinely ignored. Residents do not sit up at night waiting to hear the noise, the noise wakes them.”
James Anderson, representing Piya Piya, said: “It’s clear there’s been noise break out on occasion. It’s not been a particularly big problem. There isn’t any evidence that when we trade late we have a problem.”

The panel ordered the club to shut at 1am and stop all licensable activities by 12.30am.