Law, sex and the city: regulating sexual entertainment venues in England and Wales
| Author | Philip Hubbard |
| Position | School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. |
| Pages | 5-20 |
Law, sex and the city: regulating
sexual entertainment venues in
England and Wales
Philip Hubbard
School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent,
Canterbury, UK
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to explore how municipal law, in its various guises, serves to police the
boundaries of acceptable sexual conduct by considering how Sexual Entertainment Venues (SEVs) in
British cities are controlled through diverse techniques of licensing and planning control.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper describes the emergence of permissive new licensing
controls that provide local authorities considerable control over SEVs. Licensing decisions, judicial
review cases and planning inspectorate adjudications since the inception of the new powers are
examined to explore the logic of judgements preventing SEVs operating in specic localities.
Findings – Through analysis of case studies, it is shown that local authorities have almost total
discretion to prevent SEVs operating in specic localities, particularly those undergoing, or anticipated
to be undergoing, redevelopment and regeneration.
Originality/value – This paper offers unique insights on the “scope” of municipal law by
highlighting how land uses associated with “sexual minority” interests are regulated in the interests of
urban regeneration, redevelopment and restructuring.
Keywords Planning, UK, Sexuality, Licensing, Nuisance, Sexual entertainment venue
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
It is widely understood that law profoundly inuences sexual attitudes, practices and
subjectivities, with criminal laws concerning obscenity, sexual consent and public nudity
constructing boundaries between “good” sex and that condemned variously as perverse,
dangerous or immoral (Munro and Stychin, 2007). Those who transgress these laws can nd
themselves marginalized, with the law used as an instrument for ostracizing and punishing
those whose sexual practices and attitudes deviate from the norm (Johnson and Dalton,
2011). Much of the scholarship in this eld accordingly explores the impacts of policing on
sexual conduct and feeds into campaigns arguing for extended rights of citizenship for those
“queer” subjects marginalized by dominant norms. Typically, such scholarship also takes
aim at legislation passed at the national or even supra-national scale, arguing that this
© Philip Hubbard. Published by Emerald Group Publishing Limited. This article is published
under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 3.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute,
translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial & non-commercial
purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this
licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/3.0/legalcode.
This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, Grant ES/J002755/1
“Sexualisation, nuisance and safety: Sexual Entertainment Venues and the management of risk”.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1756-1450.htm
Law, sex and
the city
5
Received 19 January 2014
Revised 17 June 2014
8 October 2014
13 October 2014
Accepted 20 October 2014
InternationalJournal of Law in the
BuiltEnvironment
Vol.7 No. 1, 2015
pp.5-20
EmeraldGroup Publishing Limited
1756-1450
DOI 10.1108/IJLBE-01-2014-0001
fundamentally inuences and shapes sexual rights. Yet this is to miss the important point
that sexual citizenship is an ongoing process wherein the rights secured at the national level
can enmesh with laws enacted or enforced at other scales to produce contradictory effects
(Hubbard, 2013). Drawing on debates concerning “the right to the city”[1], it can be argued
that the “right” to pursue a particular sexual lifestyle is only a right in so far that space needs
to exist in the city which is conducive to the expression of that lifestyle. Without spaces to
ourish, marginal sexualities dwindle.
This type of argument has been most forcibly made in North American analyses of
the role of zoning in displacing lesbian and gay venues from specic neighbourhoods
(e.g. Frisch, 2002;Brink, 2011), with rezoning effectively instigating gentrication by
displacing “queer” business regarded as an obstacle to the attraction of family-friendly
corporations and investment in specic urban neighbourhoods (Doan, 2011). This
suggests that zoning reinforces heterosexuality (Frisch, 2002) at the same time that it
supports capital accumulation (Papayanis, 2000). However, zoning ordinances are
merely one of many instruments associated with municipal law, which Valverde (2005,
p. 36) describes as concerning “access to, control over, and enjoyment of spaces,
buildings, parcels of land, and other largely material entities”. Municipal law also
shapes space through development control (Keenan, 2010), the licensing of premises
(Valverde and Cirak, 2003), the enactment of local by-laws (Blomley, 2010) and
environmental health regulation (Koch and Latham, 2013).
In the remainder of this article, I describe how such practices of municipal law enact
a regulation of sex through space in a manner that has yet to be adequately explored in
England and Wales[2]. Here, I focus on the regulation of an activity that is lawful (i.e.
striptease entertainment), but which has become a focus of regulation in recent years
because its manifestation in the urban landscape (i.e. in the form of the “lap dance club”)
has, in many instances, been determined to disturb urban order. As I demonstrate, both
planning and licensing have been implicated in the removal of sexual entertainment
from specic localities on the basis it is “out of place”, not because it has been deemed
unlawful per se. Through an analysis of all licensing and planning determinations of
what have become known as the “Sexual Entertainment Venues” (SEVs), between
2011-2013[3], this paper draws out some of the distinctive qualities of municipal law
which bequeath it considerable, and often unnoted, power to determine the place and
space of sex in the city. A key consequence of such qualities – it is argued – is that rights
to run businesses or work in sexual entertainment are being over-ruled by local
decision-making processes that are biased towards the moral and aesthetic values of
middle-class, middle-aged property owners and developers[4]. As will be shown, this
contributes to the processes by which SEVs are pushed from valued to less valued
spaces, fuelling gentrication and creative destruction in the process.
Creating an object of regulation: dening the sexual entertainment venue
Striptease entertainment has long existed in England and Wales, mainly in inner city public
houses catering for a male, working class clientele (Sanders and Hardy, 2012). However, this
characterization began to break down in the 1990s as “USA style” striptease clubs emerged.
These clubs, dedicated to offering sexual entertainment, quickly became known as “lap
dance” clubs because they were (erroneously) thought to specialize in the forms of
close-contact “straddle dancing”. By 2003, there were estimated to be as many as 350 such
clubs in England and Wales (Jones et al., 2003), many highly visible, well-advertised clubs
IJLBE
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