The Best Places to Drink and Stay in the United Kingdom

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.

The Georgian bay window at the front does a lot of the work here, pulling Mayfair's more well-heeled regulars in off Charles Street to lean against it with a pint. This is a proper pub, if a rather polished one, with crisp white linen in the dining room at the back and private floors above for when you need to be discreet about something. The footman of the name is long gone, but the postcode still sets the dress code.

Old film posters and mismatched paraphernalia cover every wall of this Chelsea gastropub, which takes its name literally enough to put an actual pig's ear on the menu. The bar gets busy, so regulars tend to slip through to the Blue Room or up to the panelled first-floor dining room when they want to settle in. Solidly British, pleasantly worn-in, and exactly as chaotic as the name suggests.

Reclaimed oak panelling and copper-topped tables give The Rose the look of a Victorian tavern that was never actually Victorian. It's a gastropub near London Bridge, sitting in the shadow of the Shard, close to Bermondsey Street's more self-conscious end. The owners set out to build an old English pub from scratch, and the herringbone parquet and twin-seater benches suggest they took the brief seriously.

A carved wooden horse's head peers out from the dark panelled walls, which tells you roughly everything about the vibe here. The Running Horse is an old-school Mayfair pub with bare floorboards, a country-house feel, and a weekday crowd of local office workers piling in after hours. The food is better than it needs to be, but this place has no identity crisis: it knows it's a pub, and leans into that completely.

Trailing ivy, hanging baskets, and window boxes facing the gardens of Edwardes Square give this Kensington pub a village-green quality that feels almost aggressively picturesque. Inside, etched windows, an open fire, bare wooden tables, and a Tudor-style moulded ceiling keep the mood warm and slightly grand at once. Locals lean in over pints and plates without any tourist-pub self-consciousness, which is the harder trick to pull off than the ivy.

Meat butchered on site, much of it smoked or grilled over charcoal, is the reason a forgotten backstreet boozer in Canonbury became somewhere people make a point of visiting. The Smokehouse looks like a pub from the outside, and it mostly is, though the inside skews closer to a restaurant than a proper dive. It sits at a fork in the road a short walk from Highbury Corner, which is exactly the kind of neighborhood detail that makes locals feel smug about where they live.

Dark leather armchairs and pine-toned wood give this cocktail bar the feel of a library where someone eventually brings you a drink. It sits inside Jason Atherton's Mayfair flagship, though the Social Room earns its own orbit, unhurried and a little more stylish than the average hotel bar shortcut off Oxford Street. Settle into a couch along the wall and let the bar team do the rest.

A red door street-level, a flight of stairs down, and suddenly you're in a subterranean bar lined with curtained alcoves that feels like someone converted a Victorian vault because they did. It splits into a restaurant left and a bar right, the latter being the point. Weekend booths require a reservation and a premium, so midweek regulars who know better tend to have the atmosphere to themselves and the tab to prove it.

A Victorian mid-terrace pub in the village-quiet back streets of Pimlico, a short walk from Victoria. The chesterfield sofas, mismatched tables, and token church pew tell you someone has been tasteful about the gastro conversion. Three cask ales on draught, a solid wine list, and a Bloody Mary that apparently earns its spicing. The food runs from bar snacks to full meals on the floor above, which is more than most pubs manage with either.

The back of this canal pub looks exactly like the dodgy 1970s estate boozer it once was, which makes rounding the corner onto the Grand Union Canal towpath a genuine surprise. A 120-foot deck faces south over the water, and floor-to-ceiling glass doors open the whole thing up. Inside runs to bare wood and white paint, more museum café than gastropub, but on a sunny afternoon nobody is sitting inside anyway.

The wooden panels dividing the bar were supposedly salvaged from a ship and once kept different classes of drinker from seeing each other, which tells you something about both the pub's age and its Campden Hill postcode. A proper old-school London pub, all low ceilings and snug corners, in one of the city's more conspicuously wealthy neighborhoods. It draws the kind of locals who've stopped noticing how nice everything is.

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.

The oyster farm is owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, which is a sentence you don't get to say about many bars. This Borough Market oyster bar runs a chalkboard of a dozen-plus varieties on any given day, served at a narrow wooden counter or communal high tables under exposed brick and industrial light. It's a tight, warehouse-feeling room where the kitchen operates with no illusions of space, and the crowd leans into raw shellfish and porter with equal commitment.

The Campari and Aperol left out on the bar-top are a deliberate tell: this isn't your average Islington local. Hunter S. is a spirits bar with around 150 bottles leaning heavily into Scotch, American, and international whiskies, plus rum, and respectable depth in everything else. The vibe runs closer to a relaxed brasserie than a reverent whisky library, which means you'll end up talking flavour profiles without feeling like you're taking an exam.

A zinc-topped island bar anchors this wine bar on a quiet Marylebone lane, surrounded by old wine packing cases and champagne cellar racks softened by bare Edison bulbs. The list is long without being intimidating, and the staff are polished enough to guide you through it without making you feel like a student. The kind of place where a quick glass reliably becomes two.

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.

A big central island counter, worn banquettes, dark panelling, and naval prints on the walls: this Chelsea pub reads like someone described a proper London boozer from memory and then built it. Tucked away on a quiet side street off the Brompton Road, it draws the kind of locals who come for the chat, not the Insta moment. The covered tables outside are never quite sunny enough, yet somehow always full.

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.

You reach it through a quiet cobbled mews off St James's Street, past a row of old stables, which is either romantic or mildly confusing depending on your navigation skills. The American Bar inside The Stafford Hotel is an old-school hotel bar draped in decades of accumulated Americana: baseball caps, club ties, and model planes hang from the ceiling alongside photos of guests ranging from Dolly Parton to Margaret Thatcher.

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.

Rows of glass demijohns packed with house-infused vodkas line the bar, each one a slightly different shade of amber or red depending on what's steeping inside. This is a Polish vodka bar hiding behind a narrow Blackfriars Road frontage, opening up into a surprisingly long, modern space. The caramel and cherry infusions are the ones regulars point you toward. The vast coach-builder's dining room next door is its own operation; the bar is the move.

A long wooden bar, green walls, and black benches tucked down a lane in the city center: Bar Soba keeps its look simple and lets a lengthy cocktail menu do the talking. The menu is divided into Mojitos, Daiquiris, long, short, straight up, and Yakuza serves, which is a category breakdown ambitious enough to require a moment with the list. Pan-Asian food runs downstairs, but the top floor splits neatly between bar and lounge for those who showed up to drink.

The bar sits upstairs in Jamie Oliver's barbecue restaurant next to St Paul's, and the smell of smoking ribs hits you before you've even found a seat. Getting that seat is the sport: staff with headsets will try to park you in the basement holding area, so hold firm and wait for the bar proper. Once you're there, it's warm and easy, and the room does the rest.

Two railway arches near Hoxton Station, with the London Overground still rumbling overhead, house this bar and restaurant combo named after one of the old North London line locomotives. The bar takes one arch, the restaurant the other, and old railway sleepers frame the terrace outside. Inside, the look is contemporary Danish furniture against sand-blasted brick, which sounds like a contradiction until you're sitting in it.

A two-floor bar tucked into the heart of Covent Garden, with a ground floor that wraps around a central staircase and a basement fitted with booths and a shelf of cocktail books for anyone who wants homework with their drink. The bar itself is the focal point, bottles lined up in lit rows against the dim room. Stools go fast, but there's standing room, and the crowd tends toward the pre-theatre and late-staying alike.

The building looks enough like a factory that you'll second-guess yourself on the walk up. Once inside, this cocktail bar in East London's Bethnal Green-Hackney corridor keeps the industrial mood going: white walls, exposed bulbs, and a big island bar where you can watch the dining room below get on with its evening. The crowd skews local and knowing, which is really the only way you'd find it.

The antique brass water tap at the end of the bar exists solely so you can add a splash to your dram, which tells you everything about this place. A proper old Edinburgh pub on a corner you can spot by its blue exterior from halfway down Bread Street, it has the dark wood, mosaic tiles, parquet floor, and ornate fittings that only come with serious age. Eight Scottish real ales on traditional hand pumps, no pretension, and nowhere better to be on a wet afternoon.

The "Press for Champagne" button at every booth is not a gimmick so much as a philosophy. This reservation-only downstairs cocktail bar is all David Collins deco, monogrammed everything, and opulent blue-and-pink booths that somehow avoid being garish. Cocktails are the point here, served in surroundings that suggest a very glamorous train that never has to arrive anywhere.

A painted sign discovered on the back wall during renovations gave this Leith bar its name, and it still hangs in the conservatory as a kind of accidental founding document. The old whisky bonded warehouse keeps its bones on show: exposed brick, thick wooden beams, low ceilings, and leather seating that makes a cavernous space feel genuinely snug. The kind of place you end up staying longer than planned.

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.

The bar worth finding at Gordon Ramsay's Bread Street Kitchen is upstairs, not the low-key lounge you walk into on the ground floor. That front room handles daytime coffees and quiet drinks just fine, but the real reason to come is the upper bar, where you're above the dining floor action and the cocktails have clearly had some attention paid to them since the early days.

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.

A Spanish bar tucked below Westferry Circus where the bank-to-bank ferry actually docks, with a patio that puts you close enough to wave at the party boats passing on the Thames. Inside, the decor leans loud and the music louder, with visiting DJs turning a tapas bar into something closer to a night out. Sangria and Spanish beer flow freely, and no one seems to be here for a quiet drink.

Five pages of sherry is not a typo. Capote y Toros is a Spanish bar on Old Brompton Road that has quietly made the case for fino, manzanilla, oloroso, and everything in between, long before sherry became the thing sommeliers talked about. The range runs from bone-dry to treacly sweet, with a serious selection of Spanish wines for anyone whose great aunt never got them started.

Floor-to-ceiling glass on the 24th floor of Tower 42 catches the sunset over southwest London, which is a reliable trick. This cocktail bar is done up like a gentleman's club, all dark wood paneling, leather chairs, and golden library lamps, and the suited City crowd fills it as if central casting sent them over. It's part of Jason Atherton's group, so the drinks are competent and taken seriously.

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.

Five salvaged Royal Automobile Club fireplaces line the wall behind the bar, now stocked with premium spirits instead of logs. This basement cocktail bar in Fitzrovia earns its descent: leather floors, ostrich-skin chairs, art deco lamps, and padded booth tunnels that feel like a Bond villain's living room. The sunken bar puts bartenders at eye level, which is either democratic or theatrical, probably both.

Candlelight and wooden paneling do a lot of heavy lifting against the glass-and-steel hotel lobby just outside the door. This bar leans into rustic Italian warmth, with big flower arrangements that tip the room back toward opulence whenever it gets too cozy. It sits inside the ME Hotel on the Strand, so the crowd skews toward the well-heeled and the well-traveled, but the cocktail menu is doing its own thing.

Twenty-five seats and no reservations, which means the beer is doing all the heavy lifting on busy nights. This cozy craft beer bar on Goodge Street mixes old-pub bones with pops of color from newer furniture. The tap list leans international and pleasantly obscure, served in vessels so elaborate that one requires a credit card deposit, presumably because someone, somewhere, walked off with it.

The original outpost of the Draft House chain, a specialist beer bar on Northcote Road where the tap list runs to around 18 rotating draught options and north of 40 bottles. The staff know their brewing methods, their glassware, and what pairs with what, so being lost is fine. The crowd leans toward the kind of people who read long articles about things and feel strongly about them, but they're having a good time regardless.

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.

The bronzed jamón-shaped tap behind the downstairs bar, complete with hoof, tells you everything about the room's sense of humor. Ember Yard is a Soho bar with an Italian and Spanish lean, warm wood tables, brown leather benches, and a Mediterranean feel that stops well short of kitsch. It sits across two floors on Berwick Street, and the crowd tends to arrive hungry as well as thirsty.

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.

The name isn't a joke: the space was a dance school once, and you can still feel the bones of it, a big open floor with an island bar dropped in the middle like someone had to make a decision. Theatre flip-seats, barstools, and worn couches fill the edges in a pleasingly haphazard way. The stripped, slightly faded surfaces fit Dalston perfectly. A neighbourhood bar that doesn't try too hard, which in this part of east London counts for something.

Perrier-Jouët's anemone motif from the Belle Époque bottle is woven into the carpet here, which tells you exactly what kind of cocktail bar this is. It sits on the fifth floor of Harvey Nichols, reached by its own express lifts so you can skip the handbags entirely. White leather booths ring the room around a central island bar, and the crowd skews less weary shopper than people who came here first and skipped the shopping altogether.

A long communal table runs the full length of this basement bar in Covent Garden, with the kitchen at one end and the bar at the other, which tells you something about the priorities. You can drink without eating, though the steamed hirata buns are presumably why anyone learns the name. Sake anchors a drinks list that covers warm, cold, seasonal, and speciality pours, and the room fills quickly with people who dress like they have opinions about fermentation.

The bar sits inside County Hall, the grand old Southbank municipal pile that now shares its corridors with a Marriott and, somewhere below, a slightly forlorn amusement arcade. Up the stairs, that awkward context falls away into an almost circular room that's eclectic and colourful, with Big Ben framed across the Thames. It's a cocktail bar with a steakhouse alongside, which means the crowd skews tourist but the view does the heavy lifting for everyone.

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.

The bar curves along with the hotel that wraps around King's Cross Station, which itself has had quite the glow-up from its less reputable decades. GNH is a hotel bar in the old railway hotel sense, all considered proportions and the kind of hush that makes a gin and tonic feel like a considered choice rather than a reflex. Good for a drink before a train, better for pretending you don't have one to catch.

Granary Square used to be best known, diplomatically speaking, as somewhere to stand after midnight. The bar that now anchors the regenerated piazza at King's Cross leans into the industrial bones of the old granary buildings, keeping exposed brick and high ceilings while the crowd skews young professional and design-school adjacent. Come for cocktails on a warm evening when the fountain square fills up and the whole thing feels implausibly civilized for N1.

The name comes from the axe used to split an agave piña, which tells you everything about how seriously this Kingsland Road bar takes its subject. Around two dozen tequilas, mezcals, and lesser-known agave spirits rotate through the back bar, and the Mirror Margarita, served in tequila or mezcal form, has become the thing regulars order without looking up. A proper agave bar in a neighborhood that didn't need another generic cocktail spot.

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.

The bar has its own street entrance and lift, so you can bypass the handbags and frocks entirely, even when the store itself is closed. It sits alongside Harvey Nichols' food and wine floor, all white slatted ceiling, neon light, and a sharp hit of claret red against stainless steel. It's a cocktail bar that rewards a clear head more than it forgives a fuzzy one, which is either a warning or a recommendation depending on where you're starting from.

A mahogany central bar anchors this corner pub tucked into a quiet residential street just off Notting Hill Gate, where Georgian windows and high ceilings keep everything feeling light even on a grey day. The walls are gunmetal grey and hung with eclectic art, including a portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth alongside nudes with Pink Floyd album covers painted on their backs. Gastro pub food is on offer, but the room itself does the heavy lifting.

The name is borrowed from the Greek for "the common people," which makes the irony of its Ace Hotel address fairly rich. This ground-floor bar in Shoreditch pulls the expected east London crowd, laptops and carefully considered facial hair very much in evidence, but the room reads warmer than that demographic tends to promise. Order a drink and settle in; the self-consciousness is mostly on the outside.

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.

The centerpiece here is a polished metal island bar with a pyramid-shaped back bar rising behind it, all housed in the glass-fronted Angel Building on St John Street. It's a sizeable bar attached to the Jamie's Italian chain, but it holds its own as a drinking spot, with an Italian-leaning cocktail menu and floor-to-ceiling windows that give the room a slightly rustic warehouse feel, which is a trick given how much glass there is.