A working life: The door supervisor
September 4, 2009 by admin
Filed under Career News and Advice
Nathan James works as a doorman at Jongleurs, Bow Wharf, London. Photograph: Teri Pengilley/Teri Pengilley
A warm breeze stirs the stringy dreadlocks hanging below Nathan James’s hat. “It was weird to start off with,” he says. Six years ago, he was working for his mother’s business, selling office furniture, when the company folded and he was suddenly jobless at the age of 19, and feeling a little desperate. Then someone at his gym suggested that, instead of selling swivel chairs, he might try breaking up fights for a living.
So, without a licence to begin with, he gave it a go. “And I kind of enjoyed it,” he says, amiable and laid-back. “I got a little buzz, kicking people out or stopping them fighting. Although obviously there’s good and bad sides to it.”
The bad side has been in plentiful supply, not least at James’s first venue, a club near his home in Woolwich, south-east London, that he describes as a meeting place for “scumbags”. He recalls: “It was difficult. I just wanted to get my money and go home.”
Yet with home just round the corner, he soon found this was not always an escape. “I had the privilege of walking down Woolwich High Street the next day and seeing a group of them when I was on my own,” he recalls. “And I thought: ‘It’s not really worth it, especially if I’m with my girlfriend or whatever.’ So I decided to work outside the area where I lived.”
First he saved the money to get a door supervisor’s licence from the Security Industry Authority, a fairly simple process involving a criminal background check and a basic training course over two successive weekends. Then, through a specialist agency, UK Security Facilities, he began to get work at other venues, where he took on the usual duties of controlling the door, maintaining order inside and ejecting anyone who broke the rules. Like most bouncers (James is comfortable with the term), he also held on to another job, in his case as a youth worker for a crime prevention charity.
Now he is head door supervisor at Bar Risa, a combined nightclub and comedy venue near Bethnal Green in the East End. It is a respectable place, and could scarcely seem more peaceful in the late-summer sun of a Sunday afternoon. Yet James – perhaps by chance, perhaps out of habit – has taken a seat outside that gives him the best view of the front door. Even as families picnic around us, and even though he isn’t working today, I can see he is still keeping a cautious eye open for any trouble.
“It’s hard to switch off,” he admits, when I mention this. “I don’t go out any more, because I go into a club and I feel like I’m working. I’m looking around, checking people.” He is only 25, but his voice sounds weary and his eyelids droop with the good-humoured resignation of a father exhausted by incorrigible children.
Trouble in this area of London is far from unknown. Spreading cracks in the club’s windows – like two large spider’s webs – prove the point. “That happened last Saturday,” says …
Read the original article at Guardian
