We all love to throw a proper party to celebrate the impending nuptials of our friends and loved ones. From a day-long pub crawl in London to a full-blown booze-fuelled weekend in Europe, stag nights and hen dos are loud, loose and a lot of fun. But real talk: some European cities are getting tired of this rowdy drunkenness on city streets.
Ghent recently announced that it is considering a ban on stag groups and beer bikes. You know the one – it’s a giant kegged-up vehicle with up to 20 boozed-up people pedalling around the city, complete with deafening music blasting through the speakers. This comes after persistent complaints have been filed by locals about the bikes being on pedestrianised streets and the ‘inappropriate behaviour of drunk cyclists’, as reported by the Times.
And Ghent isn’t the first European city to consider a ban. Home to canals, coffee shops and cycling culture, Amsterdam is another popular stag weekend destination that has banned beer bikes (go figure!) since 2017 due to rowdy tourist behaviour. And just this year, the city launched an online advertising campaign to keep rowdy British stag packs away – and also enforced a series of new measures clamping down on the public consumption of cannabis and alcohol on the streets of the red light district.
Elsewhere in Europe, a popular pub in Galway – a city which is known to some as the up-and-coming Vegas for Stags – banned stag and hen dos last month. Edinburgh is also considering similar measures. The Edinburgh Old Town Association convener, Eric Drake told the Scottish Daily Express that 'some types of tourist are better for the city’. Clearly not the drunken ones.
Did you know you can now have a pint in the ‘Banshees of Inisherin’ pub?
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