When Fiction Starts Coming True: The Pop-Up Bar Story

by Chris Harris

Denham, the fictitious village where most of my stories are based, is actually based only a couple of miles outside Lewes, where I live. I don’t spend my days deliberately thinking up plot lines or looking around for stories. They tend to come to me instinctively through people, events and observations, which makes it particularly strange when something I have written suddenly starts becoming reality. Let me explain.

Last summer, on occasional Saturdays, we would hear the thumping of music somewhere in the distance. We assumed it was coming from a farm not too far away, where the farmer has a couple of young sons working with him, and simply put it down to their youthfulness and exuberance. Around this area, for the last few years, there has also been a pop-up bar. It originally operated just outside the village of Kingston, but two or three years ago moved to a field fairly close to us. We had heard music coming from there occasionally and had drank at the place ourselves, but assumed the louder music was connected with some sort of one-off event. But this year it became a constant.

That gave me an idea for a story. I decided to write about a pop-up bar where the music became so loud and persistent that it eventually drove the inhabitants of nearby Denham into taking increasingly unlikely action to close it down. For the purposes of the story, the villagers first did the obvious thing and went to the authorities and the council, who, perhaps unsurprisingly, barricaded themselves behind bureaucracy and achieved very little. Eventually the villagers decided they had had enough and took matters into their own hands, a villagers’ revolt if you like. The story was completed 2^nd June, and the date is sitting there in Google Docs should anyone ever think I have subsequently invented the coincidence. The council part is pertinent here; I waxed lyrical about how the rotten council made lots of excuses and dealt with the matter shoddily.

Obviously, we had a particularly good summer, and the real pop-up bar began to take off. It acquired food concessions, a large covered tent and a proper sound system. What we had assumed had been the occasional event started happening on most weekends, often for three days, and the music became sufficiently intrusive that it was beginning to affect our weekends at home. I am fairly relaxed about these things. People play music outside during the summer and, within reason, they are entitled to enjoy their own properties. There were also a number of independent businesses earning money from the bar and I was conscious that, for some of them, the summer trade probably mattered. For that reason I deliberately left it alone during most of the season. Only toward the tail end of the summer did I finally decide to contact the authorities to try and make sure there is not a repeat next year. I will go into the details in the next blogs of this series; suffice to say, when I looked into it, he was actually breaking the law. Big time.

August 4th

That was the point at which the fiction started to become similar to reality. In my story I had assumed that dealing with the authorities would become an exercise in frustration and confusion. In real life, of the three organisations I have dealt with, South Downs National Park had, to date, actually been very good and Toby, who has been dealing with the matter there, has been helpful and straightforward. Unfortunately, my experiences with the licensing department and environmental health have been much closer to the situation I invented for the book. Actually worse. The difference is that the real situation appears to be considerably more straightforward than the fictional one because the issue is not simply about whether the music is annoying. It is about whether the business is operating within the legal limits that apply to temporary events.

A Temporary Event Notice allows premises to operate temporarily without the usual premises licence, but there are statutory limits governing how often the same premises can be covered by those notices. In this case, the relevant annual limit is 21 days. By my calculation and from the evidence I have gathered, this particular bar has traded from the same location for 47 days. That is not a marginal discrepancy or a misunderstanding involving one or two dates. It is more than twice the permitted number of days. I have drawn all of this to the attention of the licensing department, supplied the evidence and explained why I believe the notices relate to the same physical site. Since then, communication has become noticeably less forthcoming, and I am still waiting to see what meaningful action, if any, will be taken. Currently obfuscation, as per the story, is the name of the game.

There is something very peculiar about having written a fictional story in which a village discovers that dealing with its local authorities is almost as difficult as dealing with the original problem, and then finding myself living through something similar only a few months later. The fictional version had the advantage of eventually reaching a successful conclusion because I could control what happened. Real life is rather different. I am obviously not going to persuade two or three hundred local residents to descend on the site and bring the business to a halt, as happens in the story. The only sensible option is to keep pursuing the matter through the proper authorities and, if necessary, through the council’s complaints and escalation procedures. Which I have begun.

People sometimes read stories like mine and think the portrayal of councils and officialdom is excessively cynical. They assume that surely, once somebody produces clear evidence that something is wrong, somebody in authority will simply look at it and deal with it. Perhaps they will. I certainly hope so. But the experience so far has demonstrated fairly neatly why I wrote the fictional version the way I did in the first place, with contempt and a knowledge that councils are flooded with low grade operatives where sadly, the good ones are all to easily brought down to their level

Over the next few months, I will post occasional updates on what happens with my increasingly strange real-life version of a story I had already written. I hope reality eventually produces an ending as satisfying as fiction did.