The rise of the 4-day weekend: is Thursday actually the new Friday?

You don’t need to fight for a seat on the morning commute. The office is eerily quiet. There’s no queue at your lunchtime falafel stand. And when you go to the pub for a post-work pint of Neck Oil, it only takes a minute – tops – to get served. You’d be forgiven for thinking this is the Monday after England lost the Euros final, but it isn’t. This is just an increasingly typical Friday in the capital. 

It’s no secret that central London isn’t what it was pre-pandemic, and this is especially true for nightlife. Data published by the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) showed that London lost 1,608 night time businesses between March 2020 and December 2023. Meanwhile, venues are closing too early to allow for a spontaneous evening out and Gen Z are starting to ditch big nights altogether.

But it’s not necessarily all doom and gloom. If, like so many Londoners, you work from home some days and head into the office mid-week, you’ll probably be in central on a Thursday evening and notice it’s rather busy, to say the least. Welcome to your new Friday night out.

T.G.I.T.

Hybrid working in 2024 is the norm: as much as 65 percent of the UK workforce works from home on Fridays, helping to cement Thursdays as the preferred night for in-person, after-work socialising. According to a study published in February 2024 by the Mayor of London, early weekday evening visitors to central London between the hours of six and 9pm peak on Thursdays. Dubbed the so-called ‘Friday effect’, the report also detailed that the number of daytime workers on Fridays in central fell by 21 percent since February 2020, while on Thursdays, it’s only fallen by five percent. 

The ‘Friday effect’ isn’t necessarily new, though. There’s always been less workers in central on Fridays compared to the rest of the week – the gap has just widened since the pandemic. 

‘For a lot of people who work office jobs, their weekend starts on a Thursday,’ says James Collins, a bartender at Ku Bar in Soho. That’s certainly the case for Anna*, whose company has mandated flexible working since the pandemic, with Mondays and Fridays being compulsory work-from-home days. ‘My weekend basically starts at 4pm on a Thursday when the first few people at work start to head off to the pub,’ she says.

People are going hard, too. ‘We always have at least 50 or 60 people who stay until close [3am] on Thursday, which is more than before Covid,’ says Collins. ‘People seem to have extra energy now.’ 

The ‘Friday effect’ 

‘Friday has been a bit of a casualty of work-from-home culture,’ says Stefan Kokot, product director of Simmons, the chain of late-night cocktail bars across London appealling to a young, corporate demographic. ‘It’s definitely been more pronounced in the last six months,’ he says of the ‘Friday effect’. Kokot has noticed a particular shift at their bars located in the City of London area, where ‘Thirsty Thursdays’ have become the norm and a huge number of London’s suit-wearing office workers have adopted a hybrid working model.  

‘Thirsty Thursdays’ have become the norm

But the change is not only noticeable for bars and clubs. ‘We always tend to be really busy on a Thursday night,’ says Oliver Verdin, general manager of the Curzon in Soho, which has a bar downstairs and popular café upstairs, in addition to several cinema screens. 

‘We’ve definitely also seen the impact of work-from-home on Fridays in the daytime. We used to have more office workers coming in for lunches or coffee. Now we barely open the downstairs bar. In terms of the daytime crowd, we’ve just seen a massive drop since re-opening [post-pandemic].’ 

Going off-peak 

To fight back against sluggish Fridays in central London, you might recall Sadiq Khan introducing off-peak TfL fares on Fridays for a three month trial between March and May this year. The idea was to see if lower fares would be more likely to lure Londoners working from home back into the office and make ‘the Friday effect’ a distant memory. 

The verdict? Meh. The venue managers and business owners we spoke to felt that the scheme had had a negligible impact on the footfall in their venues. ‘We felt nothing at all,’ says Kokot, of the trial’s effects. 

‘I hadn’t heard of it [the scheme],’ says Max*, who works in office maintenance. ‘But I’ve always thought Thursday was the better night to go out, regardless of this new trend. It used to be quieter, but now it’s ruined.’ 

Figures showed that the experiment had a limited impact on the capital’s commuters: the trial was worth £24 million, yet the number of Friday journeys taken on the Underground between March 8 and May 31 only increased by three percent compared to the same period in 2023.

The unofficial 4-day weekend

And yet, in spite of all this, it seems like it’s still possible to have a seemingly-mythical Fun Friday Night out in the capital. According to the Mayor’s ‘High Street Insights’ data from March 2024, late-night spending peaks in central London on Thursday evenings but ‘night-time spend typically peaks on a Friday evening in London as a whole’. This suggests that people are still going out at the end of the week – they’re just doing it differently.

Friday is for getting all my chores done so I can enjoy my weekend

Michael Kill, CEO of the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA), believes that this assessment rings most true. ‘As more people adopt flexible working arrangements, we’re seeing a rise in social activities starting earlier in the week,’ he says. According to Kill, the traditional working week is evolving and more of us want to make the most of our leisure time by spreading it more evenly – so, rather than Thursday necessarily overtaking Fridays and leaving them for dust, perhaps it’s really a question of our weekend simply starting earlier. 

For Anna, it’s this unofficial four-day weekend that often helps her get through the week of work. ‘Friday is just for getting all my chores done so I can actually enjoy my weekend properly,’ she says. ‘I’ll go to the gym, clean the house, do my laundry and get anything else done and hope that I don’t get any last-minute messages on Teams – last-minute meaning past 1pm on Friday!’ 

*Name has been changed