The Best Cocktail Bars in the United Kingdom

The cocktail bar inside 45 Park Lane, the Dorchester's boutique sibling, has quietly been letting Wolfgang Puck's restaurant take all the attention. That suits the bar just fine. The team behind the stick has pedigree from the Dorchester and the Savoy's American Bar, and the drinks menu shows it, with combinations that feel considered rather than clever-for-its-own-sake. A civilized place to drink well without the full Mayfair production number.

The bar is the first thing you see walking into Hotel Missoni, set dead center like a declaration of intent. It's a cocktail bar done in the fashion house's signature bold colors and two-tone patterns, which sounds like it could go wrong and somehow doesn't. The island counter gives plenty of room to perch, or you can sink into one of the deep booth banquettes if you'd rather commit to the evening properly.

The copper-topped bar and wood-panelled walls give this Soho cocktail bar the feel of someone's very well-stocked living room, which suits the mood upstairs from Jason Atherton's Social Eating House. The drinks are serious, and the bar snacks, pork sliders and duck rillettes among them, are the kind of thing that makes leaving harder than it should be. "Dill or No Dill" remains on the menu, which tells you enough about the room's personality.

The indoor cigar lounge is technically a "sampling room," which is the kind of legal creativity that keeps Scotch-and-jazz bars alive. This two-floor Canary Wharf outpost of the Belgravia original runs a crustacean and cocktail bar on the first floor alongside a heated terrace looking out over Cabot Square. Champagne and single malts do most of the heavy lifting, and pre-revolutionary Cuban cigars are available if the evening calls for it.

A frosted window glowing from within is the only sign anything is happening on Rose Street North Lane, which is either charming or inconvenient depending on how long you've been walking. Bryant and Mack is a speakeasy-styled cocktail bar with seating for about twenty, a no-standing rule, and the kind of atmosphere that rewards the people who actually find it, assuming there's room when they do.

A cocktail bar on Rivington Street that takes its name from the Jabberwocky poem, which sets expectations correctly: the room is smaller than it looks, then larger than it should be, with a wardrobe somewhere in the middle that leads somewhere else. The Mad Hatter aesthetic could easily tip into theme-park territory, but the drinks keep it honest. Shoreditch has no shortage of bars pretending to have personality; this one at least has a family portrait on the wall.

A basement cocktail bar beneath a City pub, with a name that sounds like it handles mergers but actually refers to the house's two signature batched cocktails: the Demon, something stiff and stirred, and the Wise, a lighter sour. Each batch is different, and a snooker scoreboard above the back bar counts down however many pours remain. The suits filing in after close of trade probably don't mind the urgency.

White-jacketed bartenders shake the house martini the same way they do at the Barcelona original, which has been doing it this way for what feels like forever. This cocktail bar sits deep inside the Meliá White House Hotel, tucked into the no-man's-land north of Euston Road where tourists rarely wander and hotel guests sometimes stumble upon it by accident, which is arguably the correct way to find a very classical cocktail bar.

The bar sits inside St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel, which means Victorian gothic arches, ornamental mouldings, and a ceiling hung with enormous church bells that are, it turns out, fiberglass. Nobody asks. The room leans into the maximalism hard, all gilt and warm colour, and it manages to feel intimate despite the grandeur. A cocktail bar where the architecture does a lot of the talking, and the talking is quite loud.

The concept started as a rotating bar that reinvented itself every few months, and somewhere along the way it just became a bar worth staying in. Hedonist on Briggate is a cocktail bar that has settled into its own skin, putting the focus on the drinks themselves rather than the next theatrical theme. The kind of place where the menu does the talking and the room doesn't need a costume to hold your attention.

A sliding door at the back of a fake launderette leads you into this speakeasy cocktail bar tucked inside The Breakfast Club's Clapham spot. It's the South London sibling to The Mayor of Scaredy Cat Town, where the trick is a vintage fridge. Here the ruse is spin cycles and detergent shelves. Book ahead if you can, or ask nicely at the front and keep your voice down about why you're really there.

Down a cobbled passage off Bow Lane, past the church whose bells once defined who counted as a true Cockney, this subterranean lounge bar takes the British Empire as its organizing obsession. Gin and rum anchor the menu, with bottles running from rare old releases to new arrivals, and the cocktail list follows suit with imperial-themed drinks. The kind of dim, tucked-away room that feels like a find every time.

Black-and-white prints of rock legends cover the walls, the music is loud and non-negotiable, and the shots keep coming. Mojo is a rock-and-roll bar with no pretensions and no apologies, the kind of place that gets rowdy early and stays that way. The crowd is genuinely mixed in the best dive-bar tradition, all packed in under the noise. The holy Mojito is apparently on the menu for theological reasons.

A converted textile warehouse on a quiet lane off Chapel Street, Peggy's is a dimly lit cocktail bar named after a local landlady legendary for her parties. It sits a solid walk from the busier Manchester bar strips, which keeps the crowd self-selecting and the atmosphere easy. The bones of the old building do a lot of the work, and the drinks keep pace with them.

A cocktail bar spread across three retro-styled levels in Jericho, Raoul's crams Oxford's largest spirits selection into alcoves behind a surprisingly small bar. Rum is the obsession, including a house blend aged in a Madeira cask, though bourbon runs a close second. The fruit-forward cocktails go through more produce than most grocers shift in a week, and the room has the easy, happy hum of a place that's been doing this for a long time.

A graffiti-scrawled doorway, a seedy pay phone, a luminous red light, and then you're in. The neon sex sign above the stairs does a good job setting expectations that the bar itself immediately subverts: downstairs is calm, clean, and quietly serious about cocktails. It's a speakeasy in the Bristol tradition of making you work a little before rewarding you, and the theatrical entry is genuinely half the fun.

Cherubs drip from a ceiling above walls painted in a shade of blue that became known as "Lutyens" blue after this room, which is a bit like naming a color after a single very good outfit. The Blue Bar, tucked into the Berkeley Hotel, is a small, opulent cocktail bar with a white onyx counter and a black crocodile-print floor. Sit at the bar itself; the entrance annex is quieter but you'll feel like you're watching through a window.

Seven hundred and fifty scarlet glass spikes cover the back wall of this hotel cocktail bar, which is not what anyone walking through the Dorchester's stately lobby expects. The room went full nightclub somewhere along the way, all high-backed booths and bronzed glass, with a DJ where a pianist used to sit. The drinks, to their credit, stayed classical, which is probably what the older regulars are quietly clinging to.

Stained glass panels divide the booth seating in this cozy Argyle Street bar, giving it the feel of a pub that got a quiet upgrade without telling anyone. Stone walls, wood panelling, and low ceilings keep things intimate. The team behind nearby Lebowskis runs the room, so the drinks are taken seriously and the bartenders know what they're doing. A local crowd of genuinely mixed ages fills the place most nights.

You get into this basement cocktail bar by walking through a Smeg fridge in the back of The Breakfast Club. Ask quietly at the door whether there's room downstairs, because the whole point is that it's a secret, and they'll let you hold that fiction together. Below, rough wood, vintage posters, and unsettling dolls set the mood, while the bathroom wallpaper is an education in one-hit wonders and deeply regrettable 1980s haircuts.

A semi-basement cocktail bar on North Castle Street with walls in deep burgundy and a menu that runs to what may be Scotland's longest list of classic cocktails. The real tell is who's drinking: off-duty bartenders from across the city treat it as their unofficial staff room, which says something about the drinks and the people making them. Low-key and a little tucked away, it wears its reputation lightly.

A cocktail bar inside a Georgian building that used to be a servicemen's club, which explains the gold-lettered sporting champions still running along the wood-panelled walls. You enter through a zen garden, then find Regency furniture sharing the room with lacquered tables and backlit eastern cloth overhead. It sounds like it shouldn't work, and yet the collision of imperial England and East Asia somehow holds together without trying too hard.

A blackboard on the street gives the game away, so it's not quite a speakeasy, but climbing past the packed pub downstairs still earns you the reveal: a dark, narrow cocktail bar of leather, wood, and slatted blinds that feels like a 1930s detective agency someone converted into a gentlemen's club. Copper tables catch the low light, the L-shaped room keeps things intimate, and the crowd upstairs tends to know exactly what they came for.

Formerly a bank vault, which explains both the bolt-studded pillars and the sense that you've stumbled somewhere you weren't supposed to find. All Star Lanes is a basement bowling alley and bar off Bloomsbury Place, where four lanes share space with a cocktail bar and a tucked-away VIP room with two more. The Americana theme leans in hard, but the converted vault setting earns it a little irony the décor didn't plan for.

Wicker chairs spill onto Frederick Street, which is the only hint you'll get from above that there's a full tiki bar below. Once you cross the little bridge and descend, the room opens into bamboo, Polynesian kitsch, and nautical bric-a-brac stacked deep enough to suggest someone had strong feelings about the tropics and a very generous budget. A reliably committed tiki bar in the middle of Edinburgh's New Town, which is a sentence that didn't need to exist but does.

Puffer fish lights hang from the ceiling and Easter Island heads line the back bar, but the graffiti covering half the walls makes this small Hockley tiki bar feel more like a house party than a South Seas fantasy. It's a deliberately scruffy version of the genre, tucked on a side street next to the kind of vodka bar everyone pretends not to know. The drinks, not the decor, are doing the heavy lifting.

The sixty-foot vaulted ceilings of St Pancras's old booking hall are now a cocktail bar, which means you're drinking under gothic ironwork built to sell train tickets to the Victorians. The drinks lean into that: the menu is built around Victorian-era recipes and English ingredients, the kind of concept that could easily be too clever, but the room is so genuinely cathedral-scale that the theme disappears into the architecture.

Bartenders here refrigerate their vermouths and will tell you about it unprompted, which tells you most of what you need to know about this High Pavement cocktail bar. The crowd runs from serious stirred-drink obsessives to first-timers who still want the glow-stick, and the bar somehow serves both without flinching. Old-school standards, no dress code about it.

Grower champagne and hot dogs, together at last. Bubbledogs is a small, lively bar on Charlotte Street in Fitzrovia where the pairing sounds like a dare but draws a queue outside most nights, since reservations are reserved for larger groups. Bare brick, high tables, and lab stools set the tone: this is not a place for ceremony. The menu is narrow by design, which is the whole joke, and somehow the joke holds up.

There's no sign outside, and the door is behind the counter of a juice bar, which is either annoying or part of the fun depending on your mood. BYOC is a candlelit basement speakeasy in Covent Garden with a twist: the house doesn't sell alcohol. You bring a bottle, pay a flat fee per person, and the bartender spends two hours turning it into bespoke cocktails using a vintage trolley of juices, herbs, bitters, and spice.

The 1937 Cafe Royal Cocktail Book was written here, which tells you something about the building's relationship with a good drink. The bar itself, tucked off Air Street behind a discreet Art Deco sign, is darker and more industrial than the grand hotel around it would suggest. Dark green glass bricks line the walls, and an island bar anchors the room. A cocktail bar, in other words, that takes its history seriously without making you sit through a lecture about it.

Two portholes cut into the floor let you look straight down 23 stories, which is either a brilliant design choice or a cry for help. This hotel bar sits at the top of Manchester's most conspicuous skyscraper, and the double-height room earns its name with panoramic views that take in red-brick warehouses, canals, and, yes, the Coronation Street set. Come for a drink and a look around; the city does most of the work.

Diamond-studded Chesterfields and a members-only door policy set the tone at this tucked-away cocktail bar off Seven Dials. The room runs on silver, gold, velvet, and leather, and the cocktail menu is as lavish as the decor suggests. No flames, no rope out front, no scene to perform for, just a small, opulent lounge where the bar is well-stocked and the tables seat two.

Three championship pool tables buried several flights below a City office block set the tone for this members' bar near Mansion House. The descent feels bunker-like, but the room that greets you is all brown sofas and warm lighting, somewhere between a private lounge and a well-funded man cave that's smart enough for everyone. A cinema and private rooms with self-service bars round it out for after-work groups.

You ring a buzzer on Earls Court Road, announce you have "an appointment with the detective," and a bookcase swings open into a cocktail bar. The speakeasy conceit is committed to the point of mild embarrassment if you slip up, which, honestly, is part of the charm. It's a properly atmospheric place to drink, the kind of room that makes gin taste more interesting than it did five minutes ago on the street outside.

A fire door at the top of a forlorn back staircase opens into a candlelit gin bar so small that twelve people is a squeeze. Hidden above the Portobello Star, the Ginstitute is part specialist bar, part gin museum, with a three-stool mahogany counter and a still room where you can blend your own bottle. No natural light, no fuss, no room for anyone to pretend they're just passing through.

Named for the man who built the whole circus around it, this cocktail bar sits in the lower ground floor of Selfridges, open from morning coffee through evening drinks. The room mixes raw wood and metal against marble and leather, which either reads as intentional contrast or a very confident decorator. Cocktails are new to the store, so there's a mild sense of occasion, even on a Tuesday afternoon surrounded by people who just bought a handbag.

A hidden door at the bottom of a staircase on Hanover Street opens into a subterranean cocktail bar themed around a 1950s New Orleans funfair, which is a sentence you don't type every day. There's a claw crane machine, a tarot reader, and an ice-cream parlour where the ice cream is alcoholic. The cocktails lean playful without turning sloppy, and the whole thing commits to the bit just seriously enough to pull it off.

Turn left past the hotel lobby and you find yourself in a cocktail lounge where murals of women styled as absinthe bottles share wall space with soft Tuscan colours and a dark oak bar that stretches across two rooms. The champagne-house names painted above them set the tone: this is a place that takes its drinking seriously, even if the Pub du Vin downstairs is right there if you need an exit route.

House of Coco Tang starts the evening as a proper cocktail bar, with house-infused spirits and sipping tequilas, and ends it as something considerably louder. The transformation is gradual enough that you can pick your moment: arrive early for the considered drinks, stay later if the party is what you came for. Either way, the bartenders are keeping standards through both versions of the night.

The entrance corridor is fitted out like a train carriage, luggage racks and hanging straps included, which sets the tone for what follows. Hoxley and Porter is a cocktail bar on Upper Street where Art Deco styling meets colonial exotica in a way that somehow evokes Agatha Christie more than theme park. Islington's bar scene has historically punched below its restaurant weight, and this place arrived to do something about that.

The oval island bar looks as though someone carved it from a single slab of beaten metal, then topped it with thick glass and called it a day. Il Bar is a cocktail bar inside the Bulgari Hotel in Knightsbridge, which means the crowd skews toward people who iron their travel clothes. The room leans into understated rather than showy, which takes restraint when your parent brand puts gems on everything.

Hand-painted walls and an enormous rum selection do their best to conjure a Thai beach shack, which is an ambitious brief for a spot off a main road in central Birmingham. Island is a cocktail bar where the menu is organized by base spirit, running from a Piña Colada through to a Boston Sour. The vibe is deliberately groovy and unhurried, which helps you settle in while you decide whether to commit to the rum.

A wrap-around bar divided by pillars sits at the center of this cocktail bar inside a Park Lane hotel, framed by aged brass, leather, marble, and a mirrored fireplace. The room is doing a very confident impression of a grand Edwardian gentleman's club, and mostly pulling it off. The cocktail menu takes its cues from the restaurant kitchen, which is a more interesting starting point than most bars bother with.

Pink flamingos and tropical foliage set the tone at this Bristol outpost of the London Cocktail Club, a high-energy cocktail bar that leans hard into a Peter Pan's Neverland theme and doesn't apologize for any of it. The vibe is unapologetically loud and playful, the kind of place where the décor alone commits harder than most people do on a Saturday night. Walk-ins welcome, which tells you all you need to know about the crowd.

A neon parrot oversees the bar at this basement cocktail bar on Shaftesbury Avenue, where the décor splits the difference between a tiki lounge and a tattoo parlour. Rum anchors the cocktail list, which opens with a little editorial philosophy about the relationship between price and quality. The wallpaper looks expensive, because it probably was.

Loose Cannon is a cocktail bar on Bristol's harbourside where local artists rotate work on the walls and the menu reads like a fever dream, pop-culture riffs on everything from Donkey Kong to Brexit. The drinks are inventive and aggressively garnished, the kind of place where your cocktail arrives wearing something. Students fill it most nights, and the energy leans young and loud in the best harbourside-dive-bar way.

A cocktail bar on City Road where an artist draws directly onto the walls, so the place you walk into isn't quite the place you walked into last time. It sits across from Nightjar, which tells you everything about the neighbourhood's ambitions and nothing about the vibe here, which runs lively and loose rather than theatrical. Two floors, a ruby-leaning colour scheme that shifts over time, and drinks that lean casual rather than ceremonial.

Two floors of Polynesian-themed basement beneath Mayfair, where the "Lanai Lounge" comes lined with black bamboo and lauhala mats, and the "Aloha Party Room" below that pairs orange banquettes with 1970s lampshades. This is a tiki bar, not a quiet drinks spot, and the crowd arriving in evening wear to dance to funky tunes seems entirely unbothered by the contradiction. Come dressed for a party, because the room certainly has.

A long wooden bar, inherited from a pan-Asian predecessor that didn't stick around, anchors this subterranean cocktail bar beneath Hixter in the City. The look is New York basement, done in leather seating, low lighting, and exposed brick, and it pulls off the warmth that look usually just promises. A solid place to disappear after the Square Mile empties out.

Graffiti covers every surface of this basement bar, which used to be a swanky Italian restaurant and now looks like someone handed the decorating contract to a very motivated teenager. The punk-meets-dive-bar vibe is deliberate, the cocktails are less of a joke than the décor implies, and the no-reservations policy means the queue outside is part of the experience whether you planned for it or not. Get there early.

Two giant underlit crystals flank the entrance, which tells you everything about the ambition level before you've ordered a drink. This hotel bar inside MyHotel Brighton leans hard into the theatrical: a ten-metre copper bar counter, eye-shaped aquariums set into the walls, plasma screens cycling local art, and a terrazzo floor in a shade of blue that has no business being that confident. A lot of rooms try this hard and lose; this one has the bones to carry it.

A cocktail bar inside a converted stables that once served the Lord Mayor, Mojo has the bones of a grand civic past and the playlist of someone who peaked during the Metallica years. The drinks list runs from Woo Woos to Corpse Revivers without apology, and a beer is equally welcome. The crowd spans suits and students, which is either reassuring or a warning, depending on how you feel about Metallica.

A cocktail bar inside Oxford's grand Macdonald Randolph Hotel, where the wood-panelled walls are lined with photographs of the late actor who played Inspector Morse, the TV detective whose cases were partly filmed here. The show has been off air for decades, which gives the shrine-like décor a pleasantly eccentric quality. Fortunately, the arched ceiling, ornate cornices, and stone fireplace make it a handsome room to drink in regardless.

The bar sits at the base of the Canary Wharf tower, tucked behind head-height dividers that carve out something warm and human from an otherwise very serious corporate lobby. A mezzanine bar upstairs has a quieter, more private feel and tends to get booked for events. Cocktails are the reason to pull up a stool, and the after-work crowd in good suits fills the place fast on weekdays.

The OXO lettering in the windows was a 1920s planning-permission workaround, and the building has been branded ever since. The bar itself sits on the 8th floor of that South Bank landmark, reached by an express lift, and the terrace views take in the Thames, St. Paul's, and a good stretch of London skyline. It's the kind of cocktail bar where the room does most of the work, and the room is very good at its job.

A wraparound copper bar sits at the center of this cocktail bar on the upper floors of Centre Point, with panoramic London views doing most of the decorating. The guest list is non-negotiable, so a casual drop-in won't happen; call ahead or the lift stays closed to you. It's the kind of place where the skyline earns its keep and the crowd has already made a reservation somewhere else afterward.

Victorian bric-a-brac covers every surface at this Battersea cocktail bar, the kind of look that walks a fine line between car boot sale and curated chaos. London's serious cocktail scene rarely ventures past zone one, so finding a bar in SW11 that handles a shaker with conviction is its own small pleasure. Come for the drinks, not the decor, though the decor will absolutely try to distract you.

A cocktail lounge that planted itself deliberately in the suburbs and dared the city to come to it. Proof sits on a Chorlton corner that most bartenders would have walked past, and that's part of the point. The room leans upscale without the centre-of-Manchester attitude, which makes it a reliable neighbourhood find for anyone who'd rather skip the queue and actually get a drink.

Dry ice curling off a coupe is a reasonable way to announce a cocktail bar, and Purl commits to the bit with smoke guns, blow torches, and foams deployed without apology. The basement setting, all candlelit arches and tucked-away corners off Blandford Street, does the rest, giving the whole thing a genuinely speakeasy feeling rather than just the aesthetic. Busy most nights, which tells you the theatrics haven't worn thin.

The cocktail bar inside what was once a notorious underground nightclub, Reason and Mankind pairs disco lights and dubstep with a serious drinks menu from the team behind Purl and Worship Street Whistling Shop. The room reads more bottle service than stirred and strained, but the cocktails lean inventive and molecular. A good place to feel slightly overdressed for the right reasons.

The pink bedroom wallpaper still shows the ghost of a cross where it hung above the headboard, the paint faded around the outline of furniture long gone. That level of commitment to a bit tells you a lot about this underground lounge bar on Goodge Street, which runs with the premise that you're drinking in a cleared-out vicar's flat. The team behind Bourne & Hollingsworth built the whole thing, and the chipped, faded aesthetic holds throughout.

The long marble bar and low tan chairs set the tone: this is a cocktail bar that runs from morning coffee through late-night drinks without ever raising its voice. Part of the Montpellier Group, so the drinks program is looked after, with a classics-led menu doing most of the heavy lifting. It shares an owner with the flashier Tigerlily nearby but keeps things deliberately quieter, which the after-work crowd in the low seats seems to appreciate.

A cocktail bar that moonlights as a bartending school, so the person shaking your drink may have literally just learned how. By night it settles into something more relaxed, a cocktail-led pub with a long dark wooden bar, leather stools, brass lamps, and a belt-driven ceiling fan that all point firmly at a Victorian drinking den. A mural of bartending legends, Ada Coleman, Jerry Thomas, Trader Vic, keeps watch from the far end.

A neon Tracey Emin original reading "Keep me safe" guides you through the Royal Academy's courtyard and into a lift that opens straight into this cocktail bar, tucked in the old Keeper's House wing. The room is small and the setup is serious, with botanically driven drinks and service that manages to feel genuinely warm without trying too hard. An easy place to lose an evening, or an afternoon, for that matter.

Named for the Howlin' Wolf track, this two-floor bar and micro-club in Leeds wears its blues obsession on its sleeve. An unpromising staircase leads to a first-floor lounge with banquette seating, and later in the week the attic opens up, revealing a beamed ceiling, a second bar, and a dance floor where DJs keep things moving. Orleans funk, Harlem jazz, and Chicago blues set the tone, so dress accordingly and don't arrive expecting quiet conversation.