LICENSERS will next week decide something that sounds small until you live next to it: whether a basement bar in Goodge Street gets to stretch further into the night, or whether the night stretches a little less into people’s bedrooms.

The paperwork lays out a familiar stand-off. Here’s the London Cocktail Club venue rebranding itself as The Hidden Society – discreet, refined and cocktails with a thesis of explanations. It has a scent of a curated kind of pleasure.

But opposite the bar, you’ll find residents describing not ambience but aftermath, warning of voices carrying outside their windows, smokers gathering and the slow seep of other people’s evenings into their own.

Both sides are, irritatingly, right. Cities need places that feel alive after dark, but they also need people who can wake up the next morning and function as if they hadn’t spent the night hosting an involuntary after party through their windows.

So in comes the great British solution: conditions.

There will be dispersal policies, the report for licensers says, noise limiters, CCTV and staff trained to gently encourage departure, as if closing time was a matter of tone rather than physics. And yet anyone who has ever left a bar late into the evening knows the flaws in the planning.

As choreographed as any exit can be, they are not dispersing a polite seminar audience.

They are releasing polite people who have transformed into a sleuth of buddy bears booming with “just had a great night” laughter.

Which is why this decision matters more than it sounds.

It isn’t about one bar, or one street. It’s about how a city negotiates the simple, insoluble question of when to party and when to sleep.

A tricky one for our councillors again.