“It started two years ago. We’d been in business two decades, working with planners, licensing authorities, and the police. But then all these weird things started happening.”
Alan Miller, a 44-year-old serial entrepreneur and devoted lover of London, is sitting in the Blues Kitchen, a luxurious deep south-themed bar and restaurant in Shoreditch. Around us, people are starting to congregate in readiness for a night out, and the early-evening air is abuzz with the sense of quiet excitement that tends to arrive in British cities in the summer. In the surrounding streets, gaggles of people are drinking outside, and viewed from a certain angle, the scene might look idyllic: proof, perhaps, that the UK is at last embracing the continental ways that have long been said to be beyond our national grasp.
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