Best Places for Drinks in London

Tom Conran's 1995 gastropub, Guinness, oysters and the upstairs dining room that started the Notting Hill genre

A 1708 Chelsea pub on a quiet Lawrence Street corner, ranked among the UK's Top 50 Gastropubs

The Gladwin Brothers' Old Church Street pub, Sussex-vineyard wines and a tight British seasonal menu

A patinated 18th-century courtroom turned dining room, Clerkenwell's most photographed kitchen

A 40-cover kitchen-and-natural-wine warehouse under the Bermondsey arches, chef Steve Williams

The 1893 hotel bar that wrote the cocktail manual the rest of London still reads

Mr Lyan's South Bank flagship, the first 3-PIN bar in the Pinnacle Guide, Thames at the window

World's 50 Best No.5, two rooms that split the modern London bar in half

Remy Savage's Bauhaus-precise cocktail room on Kingsland Road

Dean Street's no-music, no-mobiles holdout, the Soho the audience first read about in the 80s

The Cut's no-bookings gastropub, what Waterloo eats before the National Theatre

Frith Street's 1959 jazz room, the canonical London jazz club, two sets a night, low ceiling, red lamps

Wentworth Street's unmarked basement, the City fringe speakeasy that does not need a velvet rope

Hoxton Square's basement, the small, no-fuss cocktail room the trade has booked since 2010

Michael and Charlotte Sager-Wildeve's Hackney Road wine bar, the East London natural-wine reference since 2013

Shoreditch's whisky reference, 250 bottles, no cocktails, a single felled-oak table

Milroy's reborn under the No. 3 door, Greek Street's whisky merchant and bookcase-speakeasy bar since 1964, rebranded 2024