A year ago this week, Wandsworth councillors attempted to resolve what had become a bizarrely contentious dispute between Putney residents and a cosy little cafe on Upper Richmond Road. They resolved to cut Sweet Tooth Cafe’s opening hours and attached six new conditions to its licence.
Twenty residents near the cafe had objected to its bid to serve alcohol until 1am at weekends, describing shouting, fighting and music that kept them awake until 4am. One told the council he and his flatmate had been confronted by six to eight men after asking them to turn the noise down, and were told: “We forced Michael [the previous tenant] out. We can force you out.”
Things got strange enough that Putney.news received an anonymous letter addressed to residents opposite, telling them that if they had problems with the noise they “really ought to move to Surrey.”
The turning point came, unknown to the cafe owners at the time, on the night of 6 June 2025 when, at 1.04am, council noise officers visited the flat above the cafe and found the noise coming from the cafe below was “intrusive in the resident’s bedroom as to be a nuisance.” Senior environmental services officer Rob Newby-Walker put the finding in writing: “the sound levels naturally produced by even a relatively small group of people drinking and socialising will cause a nuisance to the resident above due to poor levels of sound insulation between the properties.”
Newby-Walker said his objection could be withdrawn if alcohol sales stopped at 10pm daily and the cafe closed at 11pm. Councillors went further: alcohol until 8pm Sunday to Thursday and 10pm on Fridays and Saturdays, doors shut by 10.30pm every night, half an hour earlier on closing and up to two hours earlier on alcohol than their own noise officer had asked for.
Six additional conditions also came from the committee: no noise nuisance from the premises; windows and doors shut from 8.30pm, a sound curtain drawn at 7pm; the outside area closed after 10pm on Fridays and Saturdays, limited to eight seated and five smoking; a noise survey and limiter agreed with the council’s noise team before any amplified music; and a corrected floor plan, the one submitted having put the bar in the wrong place.
A further eighteen conditions on the licence, covering CCTV, an incident log, table-only service and staff training, were offered by the cafe’s as part of its application, three of them at trading standards’ request.
At the time, it seemed like a desperate way to mediate the dispute through rules and restrictions without shutting down a business. The hearing ran until five past eleven at night, and some objectors doubted the new limits would hold.
One couple called restrictions like the smoking cap and keeping customers indoors while they waited for taxis “optimistic and unlikely to be easily enforced.” Councillors disagreed, recording “a demonstrable negative impact to local residents” and finding the conditions “essential in order to uphold the four licensing objectives”: without them, “the only other alternative would have been to refuse the application in its entirety.”
So did it work?
The record suggests so. Wandsworth’s register of licensed premises, last updated in January, six months after the decision, shows the licence exactly as granted: the same hours, the same six conditions, dated 8 July 2025. There has been no further hearing, no licence review and no further reported complaints in the year since.
More importantly, residents seem happy. Late-night events have stopped, one nearby resident told Putney.news this week. The party scene, it seems, has moved on, as they tend to do, leaving residents with what they thought they’d had all along: a cosy little cafe. If you live near Sweet Tooth Cafe let us know how you have experienced things.
Maja Dragovic, who runs the cafe and represented the cafe at the hearing, launched a GoFundMe appeal to soundproofing the building back in October, in the hope, presumably, that she could pick up with the music parties where she left off. But it seems to have stalled with just £665 raised from 24 donors against a target of £7,000, and the last donation made 10 months ago.
And so, a success story for a sunny Sunday. The systems worked, an extremely contentious situation was resolved through council processes and new conditions, the dust has settled, and peace has descended on this (now) quiet part of West Putney.
