It’s an exciting time for cocktail fans in London’s West End. In the past 12 months, Soho has been fertile ground for marquee bar openings. The team behind Milroy’s and Silverleaf opened Dram, Nico de Soto opened Wacky Wombat, east London’s Three Sheets and Coupette both opened new venues in the neighbourhood, Jack Sotti recently opened Archive & Myth in nearby Leicester Square and last month, Oriole reopened just over the Charing Cross Road in Seven Dials.
These openings join a litany of exceptional venues – this isn’t the creation of a new scene, just a fortification of one – but with this wave of activity Soho is starting to look like the world’s best bar crawl.
“We weren’t conspiring with [owners of Three Sheets] the Venning brothers or Nico to all open sites in Soho within a month of each other,” says co-owner of Dram Chris Tanner.
“To some degree, our choices were informed by the zeitgeist and the climate at the time, and it just so happened there was a spark and three bars opened up at the same time within 100m of each other.
“And that’s fascinating, that there’s something undefinable and that coalesces into a kind of renaissance.”
Soho itself has long been London’s centre for leisure and hedonism. The name is rumoured to be derived from an old hunting cry from when the area was used as stalking grounds before the Great Fire of London prompted redevelopment of much of the capital’s centre.
“There has always been something happening in Soho, even Henry VIII used Soho as a pleasure park,” says drinks and travel journalist Susan Schwartz, founder of London Cocktail Tours in Soho.
“It’s always found a way of staying relevant. Look at all the people who lived here – Casanova, Karl Marx, Mozart, Paul Raymond, Fanny Burney. There are the theatres, the members’ clubs, it’s the centre for film and recording studios, it’s the centre for gay culture – all of this has never left.”
History provides a richness to storytelling but all too often the arts are priced out of the very area that they made valuable.
Soho has been no stranger to that and when Nightjar opened its sequel bar below Carnaby Street in 2022, it brought live music back with it. “There’s definitely an additional frisson of excitement about Soho,” says co-owner Edmund Weil. “Moving into Carnaby is a great example. That site had been a club in different iterations since the 1930s. It was one of the first black-owned calypso clubs in London, and it had been operated by Ronnie Scott in the ’60s and then a punk venue and all sorts of amazing artists played there.
“That really felt like an exciting base to build on and also to bring live music to Carnaby – it’s actually the only reason we managed to get a late licence.”
Steeped in history
And the neighbourhood’s relevance to modern cocktail culture can’t be overstated. Soho is where Dick Bradsell tended bar and created modern classics such as the Bramble and Espresso Martini. It’s where institutions like Sasha Petraske’s Milk & Honey and Douglas Ankrah’s LAB produced some of the bar world’s finest talent, too many to name.
“For me, there are two places that run the world in terms of trends – Manhattan and Soho,” says Max Venning, who co-owns Three Sheets alongside his brother, Noel.
“When we actually got the lease here and it was official that we were opening in Soho it was incredible. It might sound a bit cheesy, but to be a tiny part of the history of drinking in Soho is amazing.
“There’s so much history here in cocktails, in art, in fashion, it’s steeped in it, so it does feel so good to be a part of it. It’s got a great scene but over the past four or five years, after Swift and Termini opened, there’s not been openings. Soma and Nightjar are both great, but we looked at the area and it felt underserved for good cocktail bars.”
It was in the former site of LAB that Swift opened in 2016, a move totally inspired by the location’s significance. As Weil explains: “We chose Soho for Swift because even though it was not a cheap deal to do, there was something about that position on Old Compton Street, there was something about the hallowed ground of LAB, that had been a cathedral of bartenders, that made us feel like taking the plunge.”
All cities undergo cycles to some extent. The feeling of right place, wrong time hangs over anywhere with a pulse like a nostalgia-saturated haze. The Covid pandemic had an elucidating impact on Soho. During periods of restrictions in the pandemic Old Compton Street transformed. Bars and restaurants placed tables and chairs on the newly car-free road and turned the small beating heart of an otherwise shuttered central London into a daily block party.
“Everywhere else was dead, it looked like a disaster movie, and then you came to Soho and it was vibrant,” says Schwartz. “It showed not only how much people wanted to be together, but what this area represents to Londoners.”
With empty buildings came the landlords looking to fill them and a crop of ambitious, pandemic-hardened bar operators looking to take a big step forward.
“It takes three places,” says Dram co-owner Martyn ‘Simo’ Simpson. “A great night out is two bars and a restaurant and if you get a couple of new bars and restaurants open up that change the scene or bring something unique, that’s what you need to create buzz.”
That buzz creates more demand and the cycle accelerates and now Soho is in a position where it’s back on top of the wishlist.
“I’ve had conversations with bar owners, some very successful people, who have told me that they need a site in Soho,” says Xavier Padovani, partner in Experimental Group and who opened ECC in nearby Chinatown 13 years ago, and Stereo in 2023 underneath Covent Garden market.
“It comes with a lot of recognition from within the industry because it’s an area that means a lot to people and when people see other operators coming in, they want to come in as well.
“If you have a successful bar in Soho, you’ve made it.”
