ANTON Why we need to call time on idea 24-hour drinking is solely to blame for city’s crime issues

Anton is old enough to remember when Derby was a safe place to drink but believes the problems blighting the city run much deeper than alcohol

YOU probably know that I like an anniversary – and it’s 16 years to the day since round-the-clock drinking became a reality. At midnight on November 24, 2005, new licensing laws came into force. More than 1,000 pubs, clubs and supermarkets were granted 24-hour licences to sell alcohol, while around 40 per cent of premises applied to either extend their opening by an hour or two, or offering late-night food and entertainment.

Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell said that the new law was necessary “to make it possible for the vast majority of people who drink but who never get into trouble to have more freedom as to when they drink”.

The move led to fears that drunkenness and disorder would put more pressure on the police and the NHS, but the predicted wave of alcohol-fuelled violence was not immediately seen. We had to wait a while before Derby’s streets were being closed off in the small hours, either to protect wobbling drunks from passing traffic, or to enable the police to examine a crime scene.

Fortunately, I’m so old that my own memories of drinking in the town’s pubs (because we were then only a town) are good ones. The centre of Derby was certainly a safe place to drink in the evening.

Couples who fancied a night away from their own neighbourhood would travel in on Corporation petrol or trolley buses, enjoy a few drinks – usually pints of bitter or mild for the man, port and lemon for the woman – and then do the reverse journey without any fear of being mugged on the way home, even on the darkest night. Any youngsters even talking too loudly (in the opinion of older pub-goers) would soon be put in their place.

As I lived in Gerard Street, home was only a ten-minute walk from the town centre, whereas for the other lads – apart from Stuart Clay who lived in Crompton Street – from the suburbs had to make sure they were in Victoria Street before the Corporation bus inspector blew his whistle and the last buses pulled away. Otherwise, it was a long walk because taxis were hard to find in Derby’s town centre in the 1960s.

Eventually, of course, the responsibilities of married life and fatherhood overtook most of us. By the middle of the 1970s, our nights out in Derby had drawn to a close. It was the end of an era. The pubs were changing and so was their clientele. Fifty years later, we’d feel like visitors from another planet.

How life has changed. I was so sad to hear that the area where I was born and grew up now described by Derby City Council’s planning officers as one that has “high levels of crime”.

They were talking, of course, about Aldi’s application to build a fence around part of its Burton Road store to protect staff and customers from anti-social behaviour, serious health and safety problems.

Weapons, syringes, human excrement all found outside the store, according to the supermarket chain. I can’t comprehend it. It was once such a safe environment.

Mike Wood, one of my former schoolmates, at both Becket School in Gerard Street and Bemrose School – is it really 65 years since we walked out of the east gate at Bemrose for the last time? – recalled a few childhood memories.

We didn’t notice food rationing because, as far as we were concerned, it always had been.

We enjoyed the air-raid sirens and searchlights still being tested. And we didn’t mind almost everywhere being closed on Sundays.

Almost every adult smoked. Our house was full of tobacco smoke, from my father’s pipe to my mother’s cigarettes.

Be kind, be honest, and work hard, my mum always counselled. Most of us do our best. But I’m glad she’s not around to see how it’s turned out for some of the others. The causes surely run a lot deeper than the pubs being allowed to open all day and night.