Creams, the dessert parlour chain, has fought against complaints against its license application, describing residents’ objections as “completely fictional”.
The café is already open until 5am, but under the Licensing Act 2003 it needed to seek special permission to sell hot food past 11pm.
Two residents wrote to Hackney Council to object to the license being granted. One said: “this will lead to more disorder in the local area which already has an over intensification of late night venues.”
The other resident said customers gathering outside Creams late at night made them feel “unsafe”, and that it makes it harder for them to catch the bus at the stop outside the café.
In a meeting with Hackney Council’s licensing sub-committee, the applicant for Creams, Mohammed Uddin, said: “I am a very compliant guy, and am happy to work with the authorities.”
The bus stop that is the subject of one of the objections has been closed for several years, and the other objection was withdrawn the night before the meeting.
Christopher Kennedy, a Hackney Wick councillor, said that the complaint about the bus stop was “insufficient to not grant this application”.
The sub-committee applied several further conditions to Creams. Uddin will have to create a crowd management plan and write delivery notes on Deliveroo and JustEat to ensure that food delivery drivers do not leave their vehicles on the street.
Hackney Council estimates that Old Street and Shoreditch could be the largest night-time economy area in the UK, describing it as a “very busy high footfall area” rivalled only by Westminster and Camden in London, and Liverpool and Newcastle.
Creams declined to comment.
Rose Henderson is a freelance journalist, studying for a master's in newspaper journalism at City, University of London. She is a digital content producer at LBC, and her work has featured in The Telegraph and The Oxford Student, Oxford's biggest student newspaper.