In the summer of 2020, when the world was emerging from the hardships of Covid and we needed to get back into the habit of enjoying ourselves, Westminster Council took the bold decision to allow the streets of Soho in central London to be transformed into one great big al fresco dining area. Every evening, the roads would be closed to traffic, and local establishments were encouraged to put out tables, chairs and umbrellas on the tarmac.

We enjoyed ourselves so much that the initiative was repeated the following year. It was an impressive sight, and for a minute our capital city, on those balmy nights, looked a bit like Rome or Barcelona. But the boring practical details – traffic flow, deliveries and rubbish collection – got in the way, and the experiment was abandoned.

And so we come to the long, hot, unrelenting summer of 2026, and Soho after dark now feels less like Trastevere or the Placa de Catalunya than the streets around a football stadium on match day. Not so much al fresco dining, more “vertical drinking”, the absurd, health-and-safety-inspired description for what most people term as standing up, having a pint.

Either way, there is a battle for the soul of Soho now taking place that has much wider implications, for other cities, for the pub industry, and for the changing nature of our night-time culture, now that it looks like we will have to transfer our Northern European drinking habits to a Southern European climate.

As a nation, we’ve not yet adapted to a new climatic reality for much of Britain. We still get over-excited by the sight of the sun. And where once we’d get in our cars and head off to the coast, today’s reflex reaction, particularly for young city dwellers, on a warm evening is to join the crowd outside a pub and stay vertical until we get horizontal.

Soho, as the nation’s most celebrated nightlife quarter, is on the front line of this cultural shift. I’ve worked in Soho for a fair proportion of my life, and I’ve vigorously enjoyed its licensed attractions. But I can’t remember the pavements so thronged with drinkers as they are today, spilling on to the roads, making life tricky for both pedestrian and motorised traffic but also making it look as if this is the country’s epicentre of where people actually meet In Real Life.

Soho covers an area of less than half a square mile, and there are about 40 pubs within its rough boundaries. Hardly surprising, therefore, that this is where the tension between the rights of local residents for peace and quiet and order, and the appetite of pubs to serve an exponentially growing, and boisterous, clientele has broken out into a public row, with Westminster Council and the Mayor of London on diametrically opposing sides.

Paradoxically, the UK pub industry is having an historically difficult time, with premises closing down in record numbers. But here we have a Conservative city council proposing to curb “high volume vertical drinking” by prioritise licences for new establishments with “a predominantly seated operation with fixed seating”.

Lord Sadiq Khan, who now has powers to intervene in licensing decisions, has written to the council, urging a rethink. He said that decisions were “skewed towards the interests of a handful of highly vocal residents and councillors without giving enough weight to the effects on London’s wider economy and culture”, and added, in a carefully crafted social media post that “you can’t run a world-famous nightlife district with a village-hall mindset”.

This is not really an argument about drinking to excess. It’s about so much more. It’s primarily the question of how urban life adapts to the changing climate. Outdoor cafés, terraces, pavements and public spaces are becoming increasingly populous. People want to sit outside, eat outside and, yes, drink outside, normally in a vertical position.

I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I do believe this represents official over-reach. Westminster already has tight licensing regulations, and, besides which, the beleaguered hospitality sector needs all the help it can get. With attitudets against “vertical” drinking, the council is exhibiting a degree of micro-management, trying influence people drink rather than they drink.

What next? A designated drinking posture? An exemption for consumers of zero alcohol beers? A laughter curfew? Mandatory seating after two pints?

Whatever Westminster Council and the residents of Soho believe, pavements have become social spaces on sunny days and they might as well get used to it. We should all embrace the fact that London is becoming an outdoor city, and leave it to the police to control drunkenness, and the authorities to punish badly-run business.

The spirit of a city should not be regulated, and Soho, for all its licentiousness, has given texture and colour and notoreity to our capital. For all sorts of reasons, Sadiq Khan is right to call time on any plan to restrict its growing, and dynamic, allure.