Essay2 September 2026 · City of London · Ghost Hunter

Old Haunts of the Square Mile

If you stepped off the Central Line at Bank around 1:15pm on a hot Thursday in July 1994, the first thing that hit you was not cut grass, taxi fumes or the warm metallic breath of the Underground. It was expensive cologne, cigarette smoke, typewriter ink and the stale wine stains of old-school stockbrokers still mourning the loss of the Stock Exchange floor.

Welcome to the City of London in the mid-1990s.

Britpop was moving from indie clubs into the national bloodstream, Pulp Fiction was about to make everyone talk in diner monologues, and the City was busy treating lunch as an asset class.

The Square Mile operated under a very different set of biological and corporate laws. Compliance existed, of course, but it had not yet become the ambient weather. Human resources had not colonised the drinking calendar. The markets were still exploding from Margaret Thatcher's 1986 Big Bang deregulation, and whole new classes of trader, broker, lawyer and insurance man were discovering what happened when corporate money met institutional thirst.

Suddenly, Essex boys straight out of grammar schools and second-son aristocrats fresh out of Eton could be making terrifying sums before they turned twenty-eight. Naturally, there was only one thing to do with that capital: diversify aggressively into liquid assets between noon and half-three, stumble back upstairs to send a few things into motion, then head back out at 5:01pm to do it all over again.

In this gilded ecosystem, five bar empires ruled the map. They were not just pubs and wine bars. They were unofficial branch offices of the Stock Exchange, LIFFE, Lloyd's and every firm whose stationery could be turned into an expense claim. Together, they catered to every shade of financial fauna — from sawdust-and-pewter die-hards to neon-cocktail trailblazers.

Grab a heavy glass of Malbec. It is time for a wander down Gin Lane and Beer Street.

The Big Five: colosseums of the Square Mile

Five operators between them defined how the City drank between the Big Bang and the smoking ban. Two of them died in name, one sold its bar arm and moved on, one refused to change and outlived most of its imitators, and two arrived late as the daylight revolution that undermined everyone else.

1. Balls Brothers: the subterranean claret fortress

Balls Brothers was not merely a chain of wine bars. It was an institution founded in 1860 with an apparent operating philosophy: keep the sunlight out, keep the claret flowing, and whatever you do, do not let anyone wear trainers.

Stepping into a Balls Brothers basement in the nineties was like tumbling into a Dickensian gentlemen's club that had collided with a rugby clubhouse. The decor was an unapologetic celebration of mahogany panelling, polished brass rails, framed prints of horses jumping hedges, and leather banquettes rubbed smooth by thousands of pinstriped trousers.

The menu was stubbornly, gloriously British. You did not come here for avocado ceviche. You came for cold roast beef, heavy slabs of English cheddar, game terrine, and bottles of Bordeaux broad enough in the shoulder to qualify as colleagues. The service was formal, delivered by staff who could decipher an insurance broker's slur from twenty paces.

If you needed to discuss something commercially sensitive, celebrate a bonus, or simply disappear below street level until the afternoon became someone else's problem, you descended the stairs into Balls Brothers.

2. All Bar One: the daylight revolution

In 1994, Bass Leisure Retail dropped an architectural and cultural bomb on the UK high street: All Bar One.

To modern eyes, All Bar One is just part of the furniture. But in the mid-nineties, it was a quiet gender revolution in plate glass and beechwood. Before its arrival, drinking in the City often meant one of two extremes: suffocating in an ancient, male-dominated pub that smelled of stale bitter and carpet, or hiding in a subterranean wine cave where the hierarchy had already taken the good table.

All Bar One smashed that dynamic with floor-to-ceiling windows, light wood, blackboard menus with legible fonts, communal tables, giant jars of marinated olives on the counter, and — critically — a design brief that made women feel welcome rather than tolerated. For the rising cadre of female analysts, traders and lawyers, it mattered. Suddenly, you could order a glass of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc without needing an invitation to the old-boys' network.

It was modern, clean, visible from the street, and aggressively un-intimidating. In a City still full of basements and closed doors, that was radical.

3. Pitcher & Piano: cathedral cocktails and high-octane glamour

If All Bar One provided the clean slate, Pitcher & Piano provided the theatrical vanity. They did not just open bars; they colonised majestic civic architecture.

Their Cornhill branch — set inside a grand former banking hall with vaulted ceilings, columns and enough architectural self-confidence to make a junior broker stand up straighter — felt less like a public house and more like the set of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical about leveraged finance.

Pitcher & Piano understood the all-day City better than almost anyone. It could catch you at 8am for espresso when the screens already looked hostile, sell you something vaguely salad-shaped at lunch, and by 6pm transform into an ear-splitting carnival of chrome, glass, bottled lager and fluorescent cocktails.

This was the playground for people who wanted to feel wealthy before they actually were. Sea Breezes, Cosmopolitans, Woo Woos, silver buckets of beer: the nineties cocktail renaissance arrived wearing a shiny shirt and smelling faintly of CK One.

4. Corney & Barrow: the slick modern aristocracy

Corney & Barrow carried the pedigree of an old wine merchant, but by the late eighties and throughout the nineties it understood where the action had moved. The money was not only in cellaring dusty ports for dukes. It was in feeding and watering the newly minted masters of the universe across the Square Mile and Canary Wharf.

Where Balls Brothers was your grandfather's study, Corney & Barrow was the minimalist boardroom with a better cellar. Its City bars were lighter, cleaner and more corporate: built for serious business lunches, client entertaining, and the kind of bill that looked less alarming once it had been stapled to a meeting note.

You brought clients here to suggest that you understood vintage champagne, knew the difference between Left Bank and Right Bank, and possessed a company expense card with a credit limit that could settle a small nation's sovereign debt. It was polished, civilised and relentlessly lucrative.

5. Davy's: sawdust, pewter and stubborn antiquity

While everyone else raced to install beech wood and halogen downlights, Davy's simply crossed its arms and said: no.

Operating under names like The Crusting Pipe, Boot & Flogger and Bung Hole Cellars, Davy's stood as the counter-weight to the modern style bar. Its aesthetic philosophy was aggressively Dickensian: candlelit vaults, brick arches, barrels for tables, sawdust underfoot, portly decanters, plates of Stilton, and the company's dark, mysteriously potent Old Wallop arriving in heavy pewter tankards.

It was a refuge for people who felt the twentieth century had been a terrible mistake and wanted to spend their lunch hour drinking in a theatrical version of the nineteenth.

The anatomy of a 1990s session

It is difficult to convey to anyone working in the City today — where people track their REM sleep on an Oura ring and lunch is a Pret sandwich eaten over Microsoft Teams — just how central alcohol was to everyday financial business.

This was a hospitality economy built not merely on after-work drinking, but on people actively leaving their desks at midday, ordering wine with lunch, and charging the experience to the firm. In some rooms, the lunchtime rush mattered more than the evening one.

Returning to the office at 3:45pm was not necessarily failure. In certain circles, it was punctuality.

What's left, and what we can prove

By the late 2010s, the old circuit had been thinned by the smoking ban, post-Lehman caution, stricter regulation and expense policies, changing lunch habits, the rise of the no-and-low alcohol workforce, and finally hybrid working. The question is no longer which basement to disappear into after noon. It is: what's left?

If you threw on the red braces today and attempted the ultimate 1996 Square Mile wine-bar crawl, the map would look strangely double-exposed. Some names survived. Some rooms survived without the names. Some became restaurants, cocktail bars, offices or development sites. A few simply vanished.

PINtPOINT's Ghost Hunter mode is where this map lives — but the Big Five section of it is a work in progress. This essay is the frame we're pinning it against. Below, the survival scorecard is honest about what happened at the corporate level. The specific room-by-room lineage — which Corney & Barrow became which Drake & Morgan; which Balls Brothers basement is now which cocktail chain; which addresses simply disappeared into an office block — is coming as the ghost inventory gets fleshed out.

The survival scorecard

How a ghost is made

One death deserves to be told properly. Number 2 Appold Street — tucked into the Broadgate complex just south-west of Liverpool Street — traded as the Broadgate Exchange until Young's picked up the leasehold from Geronimo Inns in December 2010 and rechristened it The White Horse. It closed on 22 December 2023, then was demolished in February 2025 after Network Rail, the freehold owner, pushed through the redevelopment paperwork. The planning application lists it dryly as loss of pub.

That entry is in Ghost Hunter now, closed_year 2023, demolished true. It is the shape of every honest ghost record: name, location, date closed, what came after, and — where the paperwork allows — why.

Ghost Hunter is not just a list of dead pubs. It is a way of saying: this place changed names, this one changed owners, this one changed use, and this one cannot honestly be pinned yet.

The City changes when you know what used to be there

Walk past a modern bar near Liverpool Street and it might just look like another after-work venue.

But if you know it used to be part of the old wine-bar circuit, it becomes something else: a continuation, a replacement, a disguise. The City's old drinking map has not vanished completely. It has been built over, rebranded, thinned out and made respectable.

Walk down Bishopsgate, Broadgate, Cheapside or Cornhill with Ghost Hunter switched on, and the City becomes double-exposed: the glass towers and coffee chains in front of you, and underneath them the older operating system of claret, red braces, cellars and three-hour lunches.

PINtPOINT cannot bring that world back. Frankly, HR would have a stroke. But it can show where the traces remain — and, over the next few passes, name every one of them.