The Best Places in the United Kingdom

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.

A marble-topped, oak-clad bar inside a former Victorian textiles factory in Dalston, Jones and Sons is a coffee-forward bar that skews grown-up in a neighborhood that usually skews otherwise. White walls, concrete, and salvaged light fittings land somewhere between Scandinavian spare and genuinely warm. The crowd arrives for good coffee and a proper drink, not to perform coolness at a venue with pretensions to grit.

Fizz arrives first at Kettner's, a champagne bar in Soho that has been around forever and wears it well. The grade II-listed room has the kind of gilded, slightly threadbare grandeur that makes a glass of bubbles feel like a moral necessity. Pre-theatre drinkers pack in early, but the atmosphere stays looser than you'd expect. Oscar Wilde reportedly used the upstairs rooms for purposes the programme notes left out.

A photo of a very young Sly Stallone holding a fish greets you somewhere near the bar, and that sets the tone nicely. La Perla is a Mexican cocktail bar in Covent Garden, nautical touches and a mermaid mural overhead, with most of the serious drinking happening up front rather than in the skylit dining room behind it. Margaritas are the obvious move, and the crowd tends to arrive knowing that already.

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.

A long white island bar runs down the centre of the room like a runway, which is fitting, because the Sanderson's cocktail bar is very much a place to be looked at while pretending you're doing the looking. Philippe Starck's fingerprints are all over it, including the chairs, which have literal eyes. The room is spare, pale, and almost aggressively unfussy, with candles and flowers doing the heavy lifting on warmth.

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.

The tables here are mounted on tracks so staff can rearrange the room, which tells you something about how seriously this Covent Garden beer hall takes its setup. Modelled on the grand cafes of Brussels, it runs to 16 draught taps and over 100 bottles, all organised by style on a proper menu. Long dark wood tables, leather banquettes, and a zinc counter lined with polished chrome fonts complete the picture.

Fleet Street's old Reuters building still has stories to tell, and the bar at Lutyens is a good place to hear them. The floor tiles are laid to mimic a stock ticker, a nod to the building's past that most people miss. It's a sleek, grown-up bar with charcuterie on hand, designed in that signature Conran way where minimalism somehow still feels warm. The crowd skews City, which tells you something about both the prices and the suits.

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 red-carpeted staircase lifts you out of the four-lane chaos outside and into a hotel bar that has somehow engineered genuine calm, with high ceilings, dim lighting, and soft music doing the heavy lifting. The focal point is a pillar plastered in readable postcards, which is either charming or a lifeline if the conversation has gone quiet. The mood runs warm and a little theatrical, all flickering red tea lights and hushed tones.

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.

Factory-style skylights flood the room by day; after dark the same space goes low-lit and conspiratorially dim. This bar and brasserie in Shoreditch is Angela Hartnett's place, and her presence here is itself a small sign of how far the neighborhood has drifted from its rough-edged origins. The room has the look of somewhere that's been around forever, which it hasn't, but the trick works. Come for a drink and stay longer than you planned.

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.

A split-level neighbourhood bar on Hackney Road, named for the man who burned the previous building down in 1883 after being refused entry. Arson as branding is an interesting choice, but it works. What was most recently a curry house is now a late-night drinking spot filling a gap in an area that wasn't exactly drowning in options, a short walk from Columbia Road.

The bar inside this modern Asian restaurant near Liverpool Street looks a little sparse in daylight, which is the kindest framing available. Come evening, the low lighting does the heavy lifting, and the cocktail list earns its keep regardless. The drinks lean into bold, unexpected pairings, the kind that make you wonder why nobody combined those two things before. Service keeps pace without fuss.

The basement lounge bar beneath Novikov's two restaurants has a supperclub atmosphere that feels engineered to make you order another round. It's a cocktail bar built for Mayfair money, the kind of room where the lighting flatters everyone equally and the spending tends to follow suit. A Moscow restaurateur's first London outpost, the whole building runs on theatre, and some of that energy makes it downstairs.

Floor 32 of The Shard is a lot of real estate to dedicate to a view, but Oblix earns the altitude. This sleek cocktail bar from the group behind Roka and Zuma arrives via a dedicated lift and a dark, scented entrance with water features, which is either very impressive or slightly airport lounge depending on your mood. On a clear London day the panorama stretches forever, and even on a grey one you'll find plenty to look at in your glass.

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.

Named for a G.K. Chesterton poem that makes the case against prohibition, this rambling Victorian pub earns its literary pretensions by actually being useful. Early in the week it's a quiet local boozer; by Friday the same room has pivoted to hip hop and live music. The building is enormous, all lounge bar, dining room, and outdoor space, with event rooms upstairs that suggest the regulars have very full social calendars.

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.