Fancy eating out, catching a show or doing quite literally anything beyond your own four walls this side of 2024? Good luck: we’re now in the grip of booked-up Britain. What appeared to be a blip during the post-Covid days is back, bigtime, with every seat across the capital seemingly accounted for from now until the end of time.
Over the past month, I have tried to book at least a dozen restaurants and gigs, and have been rebuffed at every turn. It's not as if I'm trying to get in at the latest well-reviewed 16-seater or five-star show, but even unassuming events have somehow become crammed full long before the holidays. A couple of catch-ups now hang in the balance due to clogged venues; my partner’s November birthday a hellscape, my mum's — 11 days before Christmas — virtually a write-off. I have spent more time over the past week refreshing reservation pages and calling booking lines than communicating with my family, just to find a location in which to communicate with my family.
“Christmas creep” — the glut of advent calendars and puddings that arrive the second the Halloween pumpkins are tossed out — has now hit venues too, beating any attempt at whimsy out of the capital. Friends report the same problem, which this year apparently began before the leaves turned brown. One friend bragged last weekend about securing tickets for a show — in September; another has scheduled in a family lunch at 11:45am during Twixmas, the only time available, despite reserving two months in advance. Others say that they’ve given up completely, as the tragic merry-go-round of Resy reloads and praying is simply not worth the small plates this meal, should it ever come to pass, would be served on.
At this point, I’d have settled for eating in the dumbwaiter
I can attest that the last week in particular has pushed me to a new edge of calendar-based doom. It began with an attempt to book a meal for my partner’s birthday, which I assumed could be done 10 days or so beforehand, being a midweek in November and all. Wrong. A visit to the website of his desired location clarified that bookings open three months ahead of time, with every spot across that period taken.
I panic-booked tables on two different dates at its sister restaurant, then cancelled and switched tacks: goodbye, fusty seafood joint; hello, vibey southern Thai spot, whose cooler crowd would surely mean a more laissez-faire attitude to booking, right? Wrong, again. I set an alert for cancellations, then made a booking at their sister restaurant for the only available time of 5:45pm. Later feeling that dinner before the evening had actually begun didn’t quite strike as ‘celebratory’, I found a freed-up space at a local at 6:15pm, so booked that instead. I then got an alert to say someone had cancelled their 7pm at location #2 (7pm! When normal people eat!) so snagged that — bringing my reservation count to 5, meals eaten 0.
The calendar warriors have won, forcing the rest of us into a world of pre-set timeslots
Look, eating out or going to a show are luxuries, not human rights — but they are also the very fabric of London; the reason you put up with mouldy house-shares and Tubes that somehow themselves seem to be perspiring, and spending 98 per cent of your life in a human traffic jam. That’s the worst part of this booking-mageddon (though the squandered time and sheer banality don't help); it’s that the calendar warriors have won, forcing the rest of us into a world of pre-set timeslots where the mood can’t sweep us this way or that.
Special occasions and one-offs might require getting a date in early, but I refuse to believe that the blanket bookery currently engulfing London is necessary or useful, only triggering more panic, and panic-booking.
Much of this does, depressingly, hark back to the “grand reopening” in 2020, when you couldn’t so much as sit on a park bench without a waitlist and/or QR code. The constant will-we-won’t-we of getting a table anywhere was a drain; the admin hoops to jump through off-putting enough to make giving up altogether a more appealing prospect. I’m sure extreme schedulers relish the challenge now as then, but torpedoing much-needed social activity between friends, families et al. is the inevitable, bleak result.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy for restaurateurs and box offices, who have now spent years being battered by winds beyond their control: their recovery is fundamental to keeping London London, too. But I can’t see how this festive surge (or is it just the same handful of people going hog wild on bookings until Dec 31?) will help much. Like drinking to excess, binge-booking just because Christmas is vaguely approaching — and then not eating out for three months to cover that cost — doesn't suggest a consistent future.
In November, this all felt like a bore: in December, it's just un-festive. Forget snazzily-wrapped boxes beneath the tree: the real gift to London this Christmas would be for the power to the city's rightful recipients: the whimsical, not the calendar warriors.
