Welcome to Alcohol Alley

There has been a bout of predictable hand-wringing in the media in response to this Manchester Evening News report about the “alcohol alley” of Moston Lane in North Manchester, where apparently there are 22 outlets selling alcohol in a 1.4 mile stretch. The Sun and Daily Mail have both got in on the act. But surely that is typical of any urban high street – along a shorter stretch of leafy Heaton Moor Road, and the adjacent Shaw Road, in Stockport, there are maybe 4 pubs, a social club, 5 café-bars, 5 off-licences and 5 restaurants, giving roughly the same concentration. And the existence of off-licences is a reflection of demand, it doesn’t create it out of thin air.

I have to say I’m not entirely happy about the granting of alcohol licences to every two-bit newsagent, where supervision is inevitably going to be less firm than in supermarkets or specialist shops, but on the other hand we don’t want to head towards the Scandinavian model of queueing up like social outcasts at a grim outlet of the state-controlled alcohol monopoly. And isn’t the fact that three pubs on Moston Lane have closed down likely to have much more to do with the smoking ban, which has scythed through urban locals across the country? What a ridiculous comment from Bob Hill of the residents’ association that this signifies “a shift from sociable drinking to boozing in the streets” – how much of the off-trade alcohol is actually drunk on the streets as opposed to in people’s houses?