Alcohol is already soaked into British culture, says Joan Bakewell. So we don’t need pubs open 24-hours a day

DON'T you just love these summer days? In the cities, pavement cafés are brimming with pretty people, idling away the hours over a latte or a white wine. In the country, it’s a stroll through the fields before fetching up at some rose-decked, half-timbered hostelry for a beer or a Pimms.
How far we have come since those killjoy decades of early closing and cinemas shut on Sundays.
But it is not always idyllic, and indeed it is soon to get a lot less so. Applications are now in for the new licensing laws; new agreements are being issued and come November 23 a whole new regime of drinking will prevail in this country.
The opening hours of most of our pubs will be extended – even those at the corner of residential streets.
It presages a clash of cultures between the old-style seemliness that now just about manages to contain the ferocious growth of binge-drinking, and those who would throw caution to the wind and let the breweries and pubs coin it on the backs of young people caught up in happy hours and hangovers.
It is probably happening at a local near you. It is certainly happening at a whole clutch of pubs near me. In Primrose Hill in north London, pubs are moving to extend their impact on our lives. Not everyone is pleased.
The sweet harmony of our friendly neighbourhood is being rent by the hiss of emails and the dispatch of angry letters, as local people come together to object and protest. It is not as if the evidence to hand wasn’t proof enough of problems ahead.
The chatter of garden drinking is one thing. Indeed, I love the chink and clatter of someone else’s party. The open doors of pubs with drinkers spilling on to the pavement is part of the happy early evening scene in these parts. But my tolerance is tested when the drinking and the night progress and the noise gets louder. And it is downright misery trying to sleep towards midnight while revellers, by now tanked up and raring for more, shriek and guffaw on their way home.
In an overcrowded London, where we jostle cheek by jowl with each other, there is a thin line between smiling indulgently at someone else’s summer pleasures, and finding it all but intolerable, with seriously intrusive noise invading our homes through the open windows of hot summer nights. That line is about to be severely tested.
Whoever thought that drinking at all hours is what our society needs? Was it the accident and emergency departments of our hospitals struggling to deal with violent drunks? Was it the police chasing an ever-increasing number of drink-fuelled crimes?
Was it parents frantic with worry as their flimsily clad teenage daughters rattle from bar to bar getting wasted? Was it the medical services confronted with teenage pregnancies? Was it the courts trying to make sense of rape allegations by women too drunk to give convincing evidence?
Was it the taxi drivers who, come Friday and Saturday nights, have to clean out the streams of vomit from their cabs? And if not, where were all their voices when the law was being changed?
The idea that we can somehow catch up with and behave like other European countries is based on a false premise. We aren’t like them. The British have a centuries-old reputation for heavy drinking – think Falstaff and his love of sack. We even drowned a Plantagenet duke in a butt of malmsey wine, and preserved Nelson’s body in a barrel of brandy.
Alcohol is soaked into our culture, as our roaming football fans and the holidaying crowds in Ibiza demonstrate. Europe – even with its vineyards and longer opening hours – does not seem to go in for the reeling, reeking, flat-out drunken routs some of us find so much fun.
Besides, have you tried getting a drink after 10 o’clock at night in any provincial French town?
We must wait and see, of course. But it will be the early-to-bed brigade – both old people and young families – who stand to suffer most. Local councils must heed their protests. There was a time when local communities revolved around the pub, the church, the school.
Not much of that remains. Let’s hope the extended licensing laws don’t spoil what is left of neighbourly solidarity.

• Joan Bakewell is a journalist and broadcaster. She lives in Primrose Hill. This article was first published in Joan Bakewell’s column, Just 70, in the Guardian newspaper.