A Soho institution that served food at four in the morning for thirty years, which is a public service
Balans on Old Compton Street holds a 4.3 from three thousand five hundred and forty-six people, charges twenty to forty pounds, and it has been a Soho fixture for over thirty years.
And what made it was the hours.
Open late
For a very long time, Balans was one of the only places in central London where you could get a proper meal – not a kebab, not a chip, an actual plate of food, brought to a table – at three or four in the morning.
And that is a genuine public service, and Britain has almost none of it.
The Prat has spent six hundred and seventeen articles in five postcodes and can state the following with confidence: this is one of the great world cities, it has eight million people in it, and after about eleven o’clock at night it is remarkably difficult to buy a plate of food in any of it.
Why nowhere is open
Licensing, historically, and we have written about it at Back To Mine and at Bell Bush Lane.
British drinking hours were tightened in 1915 to stop munitions workers drinking at lunchtime, and the resulting regime survived, in essence, until 2005. And an entire culture grew up around the fact that the evening ended abruptly at a fixed hour whether anybody was ready or not.
Which produced the specifically British institution of going somewhere else afterwards – and the specifically British problem that there was nowhere to go.
The rest of Europe never had this. Spain eats at eleven. Italy is open. The bar is still serving.
And now
The rules changed twenty years ago, and almost nothing did.
Most pubs extended by an hour. A few by two. And the country simply carried on going home at eleven, because that was what everybody had always done, and because the night buses were not sufficient, and because the staff cost money and the customers were not there.
The habit outlived the law by two decades and shows no sign of shifting.
The Prat’s nocturnal desk regards this as the clearest demonstration available that a culture is not a set of rules but a set of habits, and that changing the rules does very little to the habits.
Old Compton Street
Which we have now written about four times – at Comptons, at Village, at Freedom, and here.
And the thread through all of them is the same: this street had to be invented, because nowhere else would have them, and the rooms on it were the entire infrastructure of a community that had no other.
A restaurant that is open at four in the morning is not a novelty. On this street, historically, it was somewhere to go when there was nowhere.
Verdict
Good food, fair price, and a room that was open when nothing else was.
The night tube
Which is the actual variable and which almost nobody connects to any of this.
London had no all-night underground until 2016. Which meant that for the entire history of the city up to that point, the last train was a hard deadline – and every venue, every industry, and every social habit was built around it.
You could not stay out, because you could not get home.
The Flamingo, which we wrote about, ran from midnight to six precisely because of this: once you had missed the last train you were in Soho until dawn whether you liked it or not, and the all-nighter is what the city built to fill the gap.
Give a city a train home at three in the morning and its entire nightlife reorganises itself within a decade. It is doing so now.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
