The night out didn't close down. It moved into the front room.

Walk through a city centre on a Tuesday at half past eleven now, and the quiet is the first thing you notice. Not empty. There are people, a bus, a lit window above a closed shopfront. But thinned out, pulled back from the late hours the way a tide goes out. The lights are on in the flats above the dark bars. The night is still happening. It has just moved indoors.

This is the part the official story keeps missing. Westminster City Council's Westminster After Dark strategy, its public consultation open until the end of June, reaches for the familiar levers: late-night entertainment zones, pressure on Transport for London to restore night buses, a framework to settle the endless noise disputes between venues and the people living above them. Sadiq Khan's Nightlife Taskforce, reporting earlier this year, set out twenty-three recommendations in the same spirit, from licensing reform to a Nightlife Commission to the long-promised 24-hour city. London's night-time economy is worth more than £139 billion and supports over a million workers, and every one of those plans is built to keep the lights on.

They are all, in their way, about supply: the venues, the licences, the buses home. What none of them can fix is demand. The late night isn't fading because there is nowhere to go. It is fading because of what we do instead.

The trade figures show the shape of it. Takings between nine and eleven have held up far better than takings after eleven; the post-midnight tail has flattened. A generation who came to the cities during the pandemic never built the late habit at all. They formed their after-nine selves around a sofa, a screen, a chat thread, food brought to the door. The default changed, and it stuck.

Here is where it meets this publication's question. The evening was meant to be the ground we won back from work, the hours that are ours. Instead, for a lot of people, work has quietly moved in. The side income, the freelance commission, the small second business run from a laptop once the children are down: the slot that used to hold a pint at the local now holds a shift no one calls a shift. We did not get more leisure. We got an evening that looks like rest and behaves like labour.

That is the real contest after dark, and it matters more than any licensing committee. Whoever owns the late hours — the employer who can reach you at ten, the platform that pays by the task, the service that made staying in frictionless and going out a project — is winning the most valuable thing a post-work society has to hand out: free time.

A 24-hour city is a fine ambition. But the streets will not refill from the supply side alone, because the people who would fill them are at home, screen-lit, finishing something.

Why it matters here: Britain's night-time economy is worth £139bn and more than a million jobs, and the policy fight is all about licensing and transport. The deeper shift is in us — and it reaches anyone whose evenings have quietly filled with work.