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Brick Lane
Brick Lane • Things to do • Eat & Drink • Bars & Pubs
A night out, East End style
Brick Lane drinking happens in layers: old locals on the main drag, cocktail rooms tucked off the side streets, and music-led basements that fill up late. It’s a stretch of the East End where a quick pint can turn into a long night.
Pubs
The Culpeper Pub
The Culpeper is a four-floor pub and restaurant on Commercial Street in Spitalfields, named after 17th-century herbalist Nicholas Culpeper. It has a ground-floor bar, a first-floor dining room and a rooftop garden with a greenhouse and skyline views. Herbs and vegetables grown upstairs turn up in dishes and cocktail garnishes, and Sunday service centres on roasts.
The Pride of Spitalfields
A small, two-room Spitalfields pub at 3 Heneage Street, formerly the Romford Arms. It’s a long-time Good Beer Guide regular with four hand pumps and the feel of a surviving local (carpet, snug corners, no fuss). The pub’s history is often linked to Jack the Ripper-era lore, and it was named CAMRA East London Pub of the Year (2013).
Commercial Tavern
Commercial Tavern is a Grade II-listed Victorian pub built in 1865. Downstairs is the main bar, all tall windows and mismatched details; upstairs there’s a smaller cocktail bar/salon when the ground floor gets busy. It’s a reliable Spitalfields stop for a pint or a slower drink before heading back towards Brick Lane.
Bars
Callooh Callay
Callooh Callay has been mixing drinks in Shoreditch since 2008, with a Lewis Carroll nod running through the décor and menus. The space is split: a front bar, a back lounge reached through an unassuming wardrobe, and the JubJub room upstairs for private bookings with its own bar.
Discount Suit Company
Discount Suit Company is a small basement cocktail bar tucked beneath the old suit-shop frontage on Wentworth Street, near Petticoat Lane. The room is deliberately intimate—brickwork, low ceilings, a tight scatter of tables—and the menu leans classic, well-balanced cocktails with occasional seasonal turns. The soundtrack runs to Northern Soul and vintage rock’n’roll, giving it a late-night hum without the theatre.
The Sun Tavern
The Sun Tavern reads like a pub first—dim, worn-in, easy at the bar—but the drinks list goes further than most. Cocktails stay close to the classics, built carefully rather than theatrically, backed by a serious run of Irish whiskey and one of the broader poitín selections in town. Beer rotates through London breweries on tap, and the calendar leans musical: live sets and resident DJs without turning the room into a club.
Clubs
93 Feet East
93 Feet East is one of Brick Lane’s long-running night-time rooms inside the Old Truman Brewery. It operates across a couple of spaces—part gig room, part club—so the programming shifts between live bands, touring DJs and late-night residents. The courtyard is a big part of its character: an outdoor spill-over for arrivals, breathers, and last drinks before heading back into the dark.
Village Underground
Village Underground is a brick-vaulted venue on Holywell Lane, best spotted by the tube carriages and shipping containers on its roof. It began in 2006 as an affordable studio project for creatives, then grew into a live programme of gigs, club nights and one-off cultural events inside the old warehouse arches.
Queen of Hoxton
Queen of Hoxton runs across three distinct spaces: a ground-floor bar for easy drinks, a basement geared to club nights and DJs, and a rooftop that gets reworked with seasonal themes. The calendar shifts between late-night parties and daytime events (including drag-led brunches), so it can feel like different venues depending on when you drop in. Expect cocktails, loud weekends, and a rooftop that’s as much about set design as it is about views.
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