The bewitching hour

NCE, the wild-eyed insomniac felt most alone at 3am. Everything was hushed and unnervingly c alm, and their tossing and turning the only sound in the city. L ondon wasn’t a 24-hour c apit al, really: it was a city that fell asleep in the corner at 2am.

Now, though, the insomniac finds company — and small comfort — in the c a c o p h o ny o f late-night London. Indeed, there’s so much going on they might as well just get up and make a night of it. In our working week, the division between night and day has been blurred for a while: many thousands of Londoners start early or finish late, or work all through the night. But in recent years, playtime has caught up; the Night Tube is the new live wire that joins the dots to deliver an illuminated map of late-night London. 3am is now London’s most bewitching hour.

Your options are not limited to getting on the smash. Concerted libertines pay little heed to hours (or opening hours) anyway, for to do so is to miss the point. Twenty-four-hour London is richer than that: it’s a high-octane, kaleidoscopic scene of options. Here’s how we are staying up. At 6.30pm the gym is populated by London’s white-collar neurotics, charged on the fear that perhaps the scaremongers are right and sitting down really does kill you. As you queue for the crosstrainer, you wonder whether, in fact, it is this rat race that is killing you. At 3am, though, gyms are quiet but for a small, nocturnal population of members.

“Our King’s Cross branch sees 16 per cent of its traffic between 10pm and 6am,” reports Brett Edwards, the general manager of Anytime Fitness, a network of 24-hour sports clubs with 18 studios in London. “That is actually quite a lot of people. Thirteen years ago, when we started, night usage was virtually unheard of; now, in London, with people working through the night, we see people dropping in for an hour.”

Those who work long hours in highvelocity industries such as banking find their golden hour at 5am, when, Edwards reports, “the St Paul’s club picks up massively”.

Many City boys and girls recruit personal trainers to force them awake in the middle of the night, which permits time for a prebreakfast beasting, while still putting them in Bank by 6am to catch up with the overnight action on the markets. Anyone who has inched home, shoes swinging from limp arms at 4am, will likely have seen HNWIs zipping down thoroughfares hotly pursued by a lithe bully, or watched them take park benches at a hurdle.

Others find the solitude of the early hours appealing. Strictly, there are not classes overnight, but Edwards explains that many of the studios have ‘virtual workouts’: a programme of more than 50 different classes, including kickboxing, yoga and spinning, that you can call up on a screen at any hour to get a class experience. There are other ways to work on your look before dawn breaks. Hair lore swirls around Neil Cornelius on Bond Street, a 24-hour salon with one of those websites that contrives to be confused and confusing (which of course substantiates the mystery).

It sounds mad: while we would – and have – done many things at 3am, it is rare to chance a haircut in the small hours, when hands tremble and eyes are a little too bright. But pilgrims of the salon — who reportedly include the Duchess of Cambridge, Sienna Miller and Keira Knightley — are zealous about Cornelius.and so will visit whenever he has space.

You must book between 9am and 6pm, but you can turn up all night: there is a bar, and staff invite punters to play DJ. Mercifully, Cornelius is not the sort of person to admit outlandish ideas in the smallest hours: he will not countenance an off-kilter fringe or suggest a perm. It’s almost as relaxing as being in bed. Of course, there are unwholesome pursuits. As many club kids know, the late night/early morning slots are the most sublime. These grungy phantoms are welcome to their wardrobe and taste in esoteric DJs, but the capital’s mainstream revellers are seeing merit in their timetable. Big acts typically take the decks in the middle of the night. Four Tet hosts an annual all-nighter at the O2 in Brixton: forgive them the location for the atmosphere is worth it. Floating Points is hosting its own version at Studio Spaces in Wapping in November: it starts at 11pm and finishes at 6am — 3am will therefore be the magic midpoint, when you are immersed in the music but still strong enough to enjoy it all. Mercifully, there’s far more to midnight feats than kebabs and massproduced pasties from the hatch at a service station. The after-hours dining scene is thriving, too. Duck & Waffle in Bishopsgate is the pioneer: a 24-hour, high-end restaurant and the setting for many meditations on London’s convincing mimesis of New York’s eating scene. What does it look like at 3am? “It’s a complete mixture,” says executive chef Tom Cenci, “It’s hard to pinpoint. You get a lot of drinkers coming in after the bars close , but you also get City boys — maybe those working on the Chinese stock exchange — who want a meal. You tend to find couples: there are a lot of first dates, people who don’t really know each other.”

It’s also popular with music fans who go for breakfast before heading out to a techno gig where the headliner is playing at 5am.