The Top 47 Places to Drink Near Docket Restaurant
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A country gastropub east of the River Dee that the village literally helped rebuild, lending tools and labour when Gary Usher's team took over a shuttered local. The seasonal menu runs to comforting bistro dishes, and the guest chef series has pulled in names like Tom Kerridge and Angela Hartnett, which is not nothing for a pub in a Cheshire hamlet. It landed on the Top 50 Gastropubs list, and walkers and cyclists seem to find it without much trouble.
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Rank 2. Crown Wharf
British Pub
The brewery tap for Joules, Crown Wharf sits on the original site of one of their first breweries, built almost entirely from reclaimed materials by a two-man crew that kept going through the pandemic. It's a proper pub with a theatre and heritage centre attached, which is not a sentence you write every day. The Great British Pub Awards named it Overall Great British Pub of the Year in 2025, and Stone seems to agree, judging by the crowd.
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Every cocktail on the menu comes in two versions, light or dark, so you're choosing a mood as much as a drink. Slowpour is a cocktail bar tucked into the basement of Ropes and Twines on Bold Street, built around the idea that nobody should be rushed, least of all you. The drinks are considered and the pacing is deliberate, which in a city that usually wants to get on with it, counts as a quiet act of defiance. It landed on the Top 50 Cocktail Bars list in its first year open.
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Rank 6. Bar Glue
Cocktail Bar
A small cocktail bar tucked into Anchor Courtyard that holds maybe 30 people inside and turns the intimacy into a feature. The bespoke menu runs to eleven drinks, with names like Mechanical Bull that suggest the team enjoys themselves. Regulars who can't decide are pointed off-menu without fuss. Bar Glue ranked second on the Top 50 Cocktail Bars list in 2026, which is a lot of swagger for a place that fits in a courtyard.
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Rank 7. Sister Ray
Cocktail Bar
Wolstenholme Square's late-night cocktail bar takes its name from a Pavement album and its atmosphere from a record shop that actually has good taste. Scandinavian-lit interiors, a long counter where you can interrogate the bartenders, and a soundtrack curated by local DJs set the room. The menu runs fun and seasonal, and a kitchen pop-up covers food on weekends. Ranked 34th on the Top 50 Cocktail Bars list, and barely a year old.
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Rank 8. Mojo Liverpool
Cocktail Bar
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.
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Parked halfway between Liverpool's two cathedrals, The Magnet is a late-night bar that's been around long enough to mean something to the city's music scene. The stag-and-hen circuit doesn't reach this far up Hardman Street, which is either a mild inconvenience or the whole point, depending on who you ask. Tokyo Industries owns it now, post-refit, but the bones of the place carry fifty years of noise.
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Rank 11. Aloha
Tiki Cocktail Bar
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The 1970s kitsch is not ironic here; it's just how the place looks, and has for decades. Cafe Tabac on Bold Street starts the day as a cafe and quietly becomes a bar by night, serving beer, wine, and a short list of cocktails to a crowd that isn't there to be impressed. No long menus, no elaborate pours, no one performing behind the bar. DJ nights and film nights fill the calendar when the mood calls for it.
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Rank 18. SCHOFIELD'S BAR
Cocktail Bar
Schofield's sits on the corner of Sunlight House, a 1930s art deco landmark in Manchester, and the brothers who run it have stocked the shelves with books paired to specific cocktails, so you can order a Vesper Martini and read Casino Royale like it's perfectly normal. It's a walk-in cocktail bar most nights, classics-forward, and it placed sixth on the Top 50 Cocktail Bars list. Drinks run around twelve pounds.
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Rank 19. Speak in Code
Cocktail Bar
A Victorian archway over a plain black door on Jackson's Row opens into a cocktail bar that feels like it borrowed its bones from an industrial New York loft, bare brick, dark wood, and velvet all somehow coexisting. The plant-based menu is a genuine commitment rather than a footnote, and the drinks lean inventive without being smug about it. It ranked fourteenth on the Top 50 Cocktail Bars list for 2026.
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The bar takes its name from a pre-Prohibition rye, grapefruit, and raspberry cocktail most people have never heard of, which tells you something about the intentions here. This is a serious cocktail bar on Spring Gardens, walk-in only, with a monthly-changing menu built around four seasonal British flavours. A dedicated Martini and Old Fashioned section keeps the classics honest, and snacks, including cacio e pepe toasties, arrive at the table. It landed at number 23 on the Top 50 Cocktail Bars list.
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A 14th-century Grade I-listed manor house is the unlikely anchor of this sprawling south Staffordshire pub, where walkers and diners turn up in roughly equal numbers. Inside, art deco lighting and a Blue Room wrapped in a 360-degree mural sit comfortably beside the open kitchen and pizza oven. Outside, there are booths and a bookable teepee. It took Marston's Pub of the Year at the 2025 Great British Pub Awards.
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Rank 22. The Morris
Cocktail Bar
Follow the neon sign up the stairs and you land in a cocktail bar that categorizes its drinks as funky, fizzy, shaken, stirred, sub zero, and sensible. The Northern Quarter energy is baked into the concept: retro-spirited classics alongside playful originals, all in a low-lit room with an 80s soundtrack. Bar snacks run from snacking cheese to Pepperami, which keeps the nostalgia theme going. It ranks among the Top 50 Cocktail Bars in the UK.
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Rank 23. The Boat
Modern British Pub
A Michelin-starred gastropub on a busy A-road outside Lichfield, which is either a strike against it or the whole point, depending on how you feel about destination dining. The kitchen runs a small on-site farm that feeds the menu, with local producers covering the rest, all handled with the kind of precision that makes a venison dish feel considered rather than merely seasonal. The chefs come out to explain what's on the plate, and somehow it doesn't feel annoying.
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Rank 24. The Edinburgh Castle
British Pub
A Victorian pub in Ancoats that Jay Rayner once called "a great place to eat," with chips cooked in dripping and sourdough dragged through the pan drippings. The kitchen has since changed hands, so what lands on the table now is a question mark, but the room itself, a handsomely restored city boozer with an upstairs restaurant, remains. Craft beer, cask ale, and whisky hold the fort while you find out.
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Rank 25. The Pack Horse
Modern British
A stone gastropub on Market Street in Hayfield that walkers stumble into after the hills and rarely leave in a hurry. The kitchen runs on hyper-local sourcing, with lamb from a supplier four miles away and fish off the north-west coast, all shifting with the seasons. Open fires, warm service, real ales, and a quiz night keep it firmly a village local rather than a destination that's forgotten what a local is.
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Rank 26. Charlton Arms
British Pub
A gastropub sitting right on the River Teme, with terraces that make it nearly impossible to eat inside on a fine day. The menu moves comfortably between French and British without making a fuss about it, running from fish soup with rouille to battered haddock to sticky toffee pudding. Muddy walkers, well-behaved dogs, and people on date nights all seem equally at home here. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand.
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A traditional pub in the heart of the Peak District where food waste gets fed into a machine called Greedy George and comes out the other side as compost for the kitchen garden. The team behind The George has turned sustainable pub-keeping into something closer to a vocation, running an allotment, growing produce for the menu, and finding uses for beer-line chemicals that would surprise most landlords.
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Rank 28. The Two Pigs
Modern British
The name changed from the Red Lion to The Two Pigs in 2023, and so did pretty much everything else. It's a gastropub in a Staffordshire village, doing modern pub classics with produce from local farmers and a micro-farm next door. Weekend brunches, Sunday roasts, seasonal cocktails, and bar snacks running all day give the place an all-hours, good-time quality that most gastropubs only manage for dinner service.
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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.
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Rank 30. Passing Fancies
Cocktail Bar
The menu changes constantly by design, which is the whole point of the name. This cocktail bar in Digbeth's Custard Factory keeps only twelve drinks on the list at any given time, ranging from fruity and approachable to a rye-walnut-salt number that means business. The room is laid out like a kitchen at a house party, which sounds like a cliche until you're in it. It landed on the Top 50 Cocktail Bars list at number sixteen.
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Rank 33. Epernay
Champagne Wine Bar
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Rank 34. Liar's Club
Tiki Cocktail Bar
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Rank 35. Mojo Manchester
Cocktail Bar
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.
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Rank 36. The Grill On The Alley
Steakhouse
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Rank 37. Peggy's Bar
Cocktail Bar
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.
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Rank 38. Tariff and Dale
Modern British
A corner bar named for the two streets it splits, Tariff and Dale has a long two-tone counter and booth seating running the length of the room. The cocktail list is the thing to study: classics are grouped in threes, each trio running from the original recipe to a mainstream riff to the bar's own version, which is a quietly clever way to show your working. Downstairs there's food if you need it.
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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.
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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.
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Rank 42. Hula
Tiki Cocktail Bar
A basement tiki bar in the Northern Quarter where palm fronds, fish tanks, leopard print, and sand somehow coexist without anyone feeling the need to explain it. The menu leans on classics but throws in sharing drinks, including three-litre Powder Kegs of house secret potion that suggest you came with friends and plan to stay. DJs run things deep into the night, which the decor, frankly, demands.
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Every surface in this Northern Quarter bar is painted: murals and polka dots on the walls, stripes on the floor, flowers on the bar. When the rest of Manchester's drinking scene is busy doing moody prohibition chic, Walrus arrives in a Hawaiian shirt. The art out front sets the tone, a red-headed figure clutching a fish with the quiet confidence of someone who has already won the argument about interior design.
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Rank 44. The Lord Clifden
Dive Bar
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.
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