The Best Places in the United Kingdom

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.

The all-Spanish wine list at this Bermondsey Street bar runs to some serious bottles, which gives you a decent excuse to linger over a glass of something from the Iberian peninsula's less-obvious corners. José Pizarro's bigger follow-up to his nearby tapas spot leans comfortable and stylish, the kind of room where a copa of Pedro Ximénez feels entirely reasonable at midday. Small plates circulate for those who can't just drink.

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 church pew seating has been here since the Victorian era, and it does not pretend otherwise. This Farringdon wine bar sits inside an old-school institution, all chequered floors and panelled walls, with a list leaning toward interesting New World bottles and esoteric finds. The room rewards people who take their wine seriously but don't need a sommelier to prove it.

A first-floor members' bar tucked above one of Soho's oldest dining rooms, in a building where Karl Marx once rented a dingy attic and, apparently, never bought a round. The room has the kind of worn, comfortable gravity that only old Soho townhouses carry, and the crowd skews toward people who know exactly where they're going, which is the whole joke of the name.

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.

A long zinc-topped bar anchors this cocktail bar just off the lobby of a posh, design-led Marylebone hotel, with its own street entrance on Mandeville Place for anyone who'd rather skip the front desk entirely. The back bar is carefully stocked without being showy, and the contemporary lounge furniture gives it a polished feel that will probably soften once the regulars stop treating the cushions quite so gently.

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.

The bar at Roast sits above the stall-holders' cages of Borough Market, inside a space built around the old Floral Hall portico salvaged from Covent Garden's Royal Opera House. It's a dedicated bar area within a larger restaurant, so you can drink without committing to a full meal. Bar snacks and cocktails are the move, with the Saturday morning market crowd browsing obliviously below.

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.

A wall of antique Japanese brewing vessels sets the mood before you've ordered anything. This subterranean cocktail bar sits beneath Roka on Charlotte Street, and shochu is the point, whether you want it straight, infused with cherry blossom or green tea, or folded into something the bartender's thought harder about than you have. The crowd skews fashionable, which makes sense given the Zuma connection upstairs.

Floor-to-ceiling windows on the third floor of the Royal Festival Hall frame the Millennium Bridge, the Gherkin, and a wide sweep of the north bank. The bar sits on a raised island in the middle of a vast room hung with five bronze chandeliers, each ringed with fins. It's a cocktail bar that happens to come with one of the more theatrical views in the city, and the room itself is doing a lot of the work.

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.

The white weatherboarded building juts so far into Spaniards Road that traffic through Hampstead Heath has been yielding to it for centuries, and both the pub and the old toll keeper's cottage opposite are listed, so that's not changing. This is a classic English pub on the edge of the Heath, the kind where a long walk through the trees earns a pint at a very old bar. Dick Turpin drank here, allegedly, which every old London pub says but fewer can almost prove.

A corner pub just off Lillie Road, The Atlas has been a Fulham fixture long enough to outlast the Earls Court exhibition halls it once neighbored, which is a longer run than most. The neighborhood is mid-redevelopment and slightly adrift, but the pub itself feels settled, the kind of gastro pub that draws a regular crowd who know exactly what they came for and don't need a reason to check the menu twice.

The centerpiece is an island bar with a tiled mosaic that anchors a huge open room somewhere between American diner and grungy music venue. It's a cocktail bar leaning hard into bourbon, with a short list of well-made classics and one of the more serious American whiskey collections in the neighborhood. Come early enough and you can actually perch at the bar before the live music takes over and the volume becomes non-negotiable.

A backstreet pub tucked where Battersea quietly becomes Clapham Old Town, with big windows facing a residential side street and no particular ambition to be discovered. The team behind it runs a small group of pubs across the capital, all saved from obscurity and gently smartened up without losing the plot. Good food, decent service, and a wide bar area that still feels like a local rather than a concept.

A corner pub on Northcote Road with bare wooden tables and plank walls that give it more country-inn energy than Battersea terrace. The glass-roofed dining room out back has an open fireplace for winter and air-conditioning for summer, which covers the meteorological bases as well as any London pub can. Pavement tables with heaters and an awning stretch the outdoor season considerably. Part of the Three Cheers group.

The red lights behind the bar are a relic from when this corner pub had a rather different clientele. These days it draws theatre-goers heading upstairs to the Canal Cafe and Maida Vale professionals who've discovered that oak panelling and an open fire beat a wine bar. It sits a step from the Regent's Canal in Little Venice, mismatched chairs, ornate cornices, and all the cosy warmth of a pub that knows exactly what it is.

A big, bright gastropub sitting on the south side of Hammersmith Bridge, with painted panelled walls, mismatched chairs, and the occasional coach bench to make the scale feel cosy. Ales on draught, a wine list that outruns the average local, and a Sunday roast that handles its business without fuss. When the weather behaves, French doors open onto a raised sun-deck and walled garden, which closes at nine, so plan accordingly.

A fireplace, Dalí prints on the panelled walls, and the kind of worn-in sofas that make you stay for a third pint. Tucked into the Georgian residential streets between Fulham Road and King's Road, this Chelsea pub has held onto its neighbourhood-local feel while the rest of the postcode drifted upmarket. The clientele dresses well and knows the barman's name, which is exactly the Chelsea equilibrium.

Stuffed birds, stacked crockery, and several lifetimes of collected oddities cover every wall and ceiling of this old Morningside pub, making it feel less like a bar and more like a Victorian curiosity shop that somehow got a liquor license. The shelves behind the larger bar hold what may be Edinburgh's deepest whisky selection, and Caledonian and Belhaven come on draught for anyone who finds the malt list overwhelming, which is fair.

Oysters at the bar keep this Notting Hill pub from feeling like anything it isn't. The room is genuinely small, with mustard walls, red lino underfoot, and rippled glass that softens the light just enough. The food is better than it has any right to be for a place this unpretentious, and the crowd tends to dress up slightly without meaning to. An old-school neighbourhood pub that never needed to announce itself as one.

The Guinness record for Britain's smallest bar hangs over a room barely bigger than a generous wardrobe, tucked immediately to your right as you walk in. This old Fuller's pub has been on the Thames at Hammersmith forever, and the back terrace looks straight over the river, which makes it the unofficial headquarters for Boat Race day. Finding it requires following the north bank, crossing a small park, and taking a narrow alley that seems designed to test commitment.

Corner site, large windows, maroon banquette seating, and not a whiff of charm in the surrounding streetscape. The Easton is a straightforwardly unfussy Clerkenwell pub that puts its energy into the plate rather than the room: Sunday roasts, scotch eggs, ham hock croquettes, and the kind of hearty gastro-pub cooking that makes the unattractive setting feel entirely beside the point.

Tucked between the Electric Cinema and Brasserie on Portobello Road, this members' bar is the Notting Hill outpost of the Soho House group. A staircase coiled around a lift shaft delivers you into a long, loft-style room with pitched ceiling and roof lights, the look landing firmly in the seventies: whitewashed walls, chunky pale teak, industrial pendant lights. The kind of bar where everyone seems to know someone across the room.

Fresh-cut flowers on the tables and colourful walls set the tone at this glammed-up Primrose Hill gastropub, a short walk from Camden Lock along the canal. Light and airy, it pulls in the kind of locals who own small dogs and treat them as plus-ones. Gwyneth Paltrow is reportedly a regular, which tells you roughly everything about the postcode.

Named for a French racehorse, this gastro pub near King's Cross and St Pancras runs on Anglo-French logic, with bistro food, a decent fromage selection, and an upstairs cocktail lounge that quietly upgrades the whole operation. The embossed tin ceiling and mismatched chairs keep things grounded on the ground floor, but head up and the mood shifts. Eurostars waiting for their trains have clearly discovered it, which tells you something about the vibe.

The Victorian corner pub on Latchmere Road reads like a straightforward Battersea local until you notice the food. It's a gastropub, part of a small group run by the brothers behind The Atlas in Fulham, and the kitchen leans Mediterranean in a way that outlasts the trend. Regulars who could recite the menu from memory still come back, which tells you something about the room as much as the cooking.

The revolving oak door that greets you once belonged to a hotel, and it still carries itself accordingly. Inside, the old mock-Tudor pub has been opened up into a roomy gastropub with Chesterfield armchairs up front and a dining room that knows its place behind. The wine list leans into Sussex sparkling, with Ridgeview among them and over twenty pours by the glass, plus a compact cocktail menu for anyone not in a wine mood.

A proper pub tucked into a Bermondsey backstreet, The Grange has had its original brickwork and floorboards stripped back and cleaned up, which is a nicer way to gentrify than most. The ales are kept well, the Bloody Marys arrive with real heat, and once the weather turns, the garden and wood-fired pizza oven become the main event. A neighborhood local that hasn't forgotten what a neighborhood local is supposed to be.

The rear terrace looks straight across the Thames to the O2, which is either atmospheric or a conversation starter depending on your mood. The Gun is a Grade II-listed gastropub on the Isle of Dogs, old enough to feel genuinely weathered, tucked into a stretch of Canary Wharf's edge that still manages to feel like it belongs to a quieter London. The kind of place people make a small effort to reach, then stay longer than planned.

A curtain just inside the door does a surprising amount of heavy lifting, shifting the mood from Stoke Newington high street to somewhere vaguely central European. This Hackney ale and cider house packs its tables with people in their late twenties and thirties who take the draught list seriously, and they have reason to: real ales, craft beers, stouts, lagers, and ciders stretch across a bar that nearly spans the room.

Hanging baskets and a plant-lined terrace make this Notting Hill pub look like it was lifted from a country village and dropped, somewhat incongruously, opposite a police station. Inside, cream panelling and dark green carpet keep the cottage illusion going. Tables fill every corner, shared willingly among regulars who clearly consider the place their living room. A proper neighbourhood pub tucked down a quiet back street away from Portobello's weekend chaos.

A bar on a quiet Notting Hill street that somehow pulls off elegant without trying too hard, The Lonsdale has a long, sweeping counter running the full length of a ground-floor room that leans retro without committing to a theme. It draws a weekend crowd that fills up fast, so arriving early secures a table at the back. The late license keeps things going well past the point when sensible people head home.

The corridor just inside the front door is lined with framed glowing reviews, which is either very confident or very self-aware, and at The Lord Clifden it's probably both. This Jewellery Quarter pub has Banksy prints, exposed brick, beautiful wood panelling, and an enormous beer garden out back. The bar straddles two rooms and the whole thing has the unhurried feel of a proper British boozer. Ale, scampi fries, pub grub.

Marble surfaces, dark wood, and low leather seating fill this basement cocktail bar beneath the Grosvenor Square Marriott, where a 1920s soundtrack sets the mood and a speakeasy entrance, complete with spy hole, keeps things theatrical. You reach it via a side door on Duke Street, knock, and wait to be appraised. The door from the hotel lobby is less cinematic but works just as well. Either way, the cocktails are the point.

A Victorian banking hall on Threadneedle Street, all soaring ceilings and white linen that still feels vaguely capable of financing a railway. The cocktail list and crisp service quickly establish this as a serious cocktail bar, not just a power-lunch backdrop. City workers fill it noisily through the day, then the room empties fast when the commuter trains call. Come early evening for elbow room that, an hour later, would be genuinely hard to believe.

The old Packman table in the corner sets the tone for this deliberately scruffy pub near London Bridge. Garishly painted booths, mismatched furniture, and a live music stage draw trainee medics from Guy's Hospital and anyone else who'd rather not be somewhere with a dress code. Gourmet hotdogs made with Bermondsey sausages are the kitchen's one serious move. A proper boozer wearing its rough edges without apology.

Stripped pine, distressed plaster walls, and sturdy oak tables give this Belgravia gastro pub the feel of a French farmhouse that somehow ended up on one of London's most expensive postcodes. The ground floor bar draws a neighbourhood crowd who look like they own the neighbourhood, and the Sunday roast pulls people upstairs into the dining rooms. A small hotel sits above it all, in case you'd rather not leave.

Tucked in the basement beneath a Mexican restaurant on Brewer Street, this compact cocktail bar organizes its drinks menu around tequila and rum, divided into Batidas, Margaritas, Daiquiris, and the catchall "Gringos." Dick Bradsell, who invented the Bramble and the Vodka Espresso, has been known to hold court here, which is the kind of detail that makes a basement bar feel like a discovery rather than an oversight.

The curved corner frontage wraps around Great Dover and Trinity Streets like the prow of a ship, and inside the Roebuck earns its old back-street boozer status without apology. Mismatched wooden tables ring an island bar, with a slightly loungy back room for when you need to feel less like you're in a pub but still want to be in a pub. Cask ales on handpump, Meantime on keg, and Cotswold cider cover the bases.

The worn linoleum and unchanged fittings place this old pub firmly in the era before anyone thought pubs needed a rebrand. Sitting at the heart of Columbia Road, it gets absolutely heaved on Sunday mornings when the flower market fills the street outside, but weekday evenings are quieter and the beer flows steadily. Apparently the interior is convincing enough to double as wartime London on screen, which tells you something about how little has changed.

A rum bar on All Saints Road with over a hundred bottles of the stuff downstairs, which is either a paradise or a problem depending on your Thursday. The beach-shack aesthetic runs to unpolished wood, mismatched colourful chairs, and walls clad in painted planks, so nobody's pretending this is a cocktail lounge in a suit. Caribbean food is upstairs if hunger strikes, but the basement is the reason to come.

The bar itself is carved from a solid slab of cork, its surface made from port-soaked chestnut reclaimed from old Sandeman vats, which sets the tone nicely. This cocktail bar sits in medieval vaults beneath the City, where the Sandeman family once rolled barrels up from the Thames through a tunnel that's now bricked over. Big punchy cocktails and a serious wine list, for when the square mile needs a drink, which is always.

A blood-red leather chesterfield and a pair of wingback chairs anchor the centre of this Victorian gastropub, tucked down a back street between Archway and Tufnell Park. Exposed brick, antique mirrors, an open fireplace, and a cosy yard out back make it feel more like a found object than a designed one. The kind of pub that rewards the ten-minute walk from the tube.

A Belgravia pub that swapped its exterior walls for floor-to-ceiling glass, so the neighborhood gets a good look at you nursing a pint among antlers and stuffed game birds. Inside, taupe-green panelling and distressed oak floors nail the modern gastropub brief so thoroughly it almost feels like the genre invented itself here. The kitchen leans British and serious, which means the crowd in the leather seats tends to as well.

Factory tiles, gunmetal grey walls, and mismatched furniture mark this Kennington gastropub as a thoroughly gastrofied old boozer, and it wears the look without apology. The open kitchen and chalkboard menus do their duty, the local young professionals fill it on the way home most evenings, and the whole thing hums along exactly as a neighborhood pub should without making a fuss about it.

Deep Lincoln green walls and booth seating set the mood at this dimly lit cocktail bar tucked into Edinburgh's New Town, a solid walk from the George Street crowd. The whole thing is built around a fictional Victorian rogue whose globe-trotting misadventures, including a hasty exit from London after the Cleveland Street Scandal, inspired the drinks menu. A good excuse to order something with a story attached, even if the story was made up last Tuesday.

Canoes hang from the ceiling and buoys sway above the bar, which should tell you everything about what kind of tiki cocktail bar this is. Been around forever in the basement of the London Hilton, Trader Vic's leans fully into the bamboo-and-carved-heads fantasy without a flicker of irony. The menu is vast, rum and pineapple run through most of it, and nothing strays off-brand. Order something with an umbrella in it and commit.

A Damien Hirst cow and cockerel, suspended in formaldehyde, preside over the cathedral-scale bar inside a converted Victorian power station in Shoreditch. The drinks program is the work of a serious collaborator, so cocktails get as much thought as the famously binary food menu next door. The room does the heavy lifting, and it lifts heavy: high ceilings, industrial bones, and faces pressed to the glass outside.

A champagne bar perched nearly 600 feet up in Tower 42, in the heart of the City, where the point is unmistakably the view. You reserve by phone, clear a security line that takes its cues from airport protocol, and take an ear-popping lift to the 42nd floor. London spreads out in every direction, which is fortunate, because the drinks list gives you time to look at it.

The name is short for the Dutch East India Company, which tells you most of what you need to know about this cocktail bar tucked into a courtyard behind King's Cross. The drinks list leans into punches, barrel-aged cocktails, and other recipes that feel lifted from a ship's manifest, all developed with the consultancy behind Purl. It rewards the walk through the yard to find it.

The bar's centrepiece is a slab of Italian granite so large it forms an entire corner, one of over a hundred tonnes quarried specifically for this room. It's a cocktail bar inside an izakaya-style Japanese restaurant, which means the people-watching is aggressively good: Knightsbridge's most decorative regulars tend to congregate here, looking like they've dressed for a different kind of premiere. The drinks menu holds its own against the kitchen's reputation.