Panel hears Windsor sports bar bid to change licence conditions after facing objections

A ‘small family business’ in Windsor made its case to councillors this week after its bid to alter its licence was met with concerns over potential noise complaints.

Electric Nightlife Limited, trading as The Sporting King at 73 Peascod Street, submitted a licensing variation application to the council.

But after objections around public nuisance were raised, the application was heard at a Royal Borough licensing and public space protection order (PSPO) sub-committee meeting on Tuesday.

Speaking at the Town Hall meeting on behalf of Electric Nightlife, Linda Wells said the sports bar is a ‘small family business’, with no link to the previous venue at the location, Electric Garden.

The venue wants to start selling alcohol earlier on a Sunday, from 10am instead of 12pm.

This would bring the hours ‘in line’ with other local pubs and allow The Sporting King to show earlier matches on a Sunday.

No changes to the evening times for the sale of alcohol are proposed.

Councillor Genevieve Gosling (Con, Sunningdale and Cheapside) said she wasn’t concerned about the morning hours but rather about plans to extend the live music at the premises until 1am on Friday and Saturday.

Ms Wells reassured councillors that the sports bar is ‘certainly not a nightclub environment’.

She said: “I can’t see that we would ever want any band or karaoke event or live mic night to go to one o’clock in the morning.

“It’s more for the occasional private hire of a venue for birthday parties where you would have a DJ environment. It wouldn’t be something we’d do every weekend.”

A comment submitted against the application said glass bottles have been emptied into bins at anti-social hours, with the noise causing ‘great distress and disruption’.

Ms Wells ‘wholeheartedly apologised’ if the noise from the bottles had caused the resident any distress.

“In all honesty, we should have considered that noise, we just didn’t think,” she said

“We’d engage with the neighbours directly around us in that block and just naively didn’t realise how much that noise carried.”

Since this concern was raised, Ms Wells said glass bottles are instead disposed of in the morning.

Some conditions currently on the premises licence could also be removed or changed if the variation application is approved – such as needing a noise limiter to control sound levels during live events.

Currently, customers cannot drink outside the pub after 11pm.

The application sets out this should only be enforced on the street rather than the pub’s covered garden space, where smokers take their drinks.

But Michael McNaughton, an RBWM environmental protection officer, said the venue has had a long history of noise complaints, particularly during the summer months.

He said: “We think that with these controls taken away such as the noise meter and allowing people to go outside with drink, that there would be a propensity for further complaints to be made.”

But Ms Wells argued that the noise limiter – which was imposed on the previous venue – was never installed.

She said: “To keep some of those conditions in place – particularly if it’s a noise limiter that isn’t there already – it limits what we can do as a business.

“It will cause us significant cost to have to comply with something that, respectfully, is not our fault.