PINtPRESSEssay2 September 2026 · City of London · Ghost Hunter

Part 1 of 2 · Companion essay: The Geography of Sobriety →

Old Haunts of the Square Mile

Claret, red braces and three-hour lunches beneath the modern City.

Before flat whites, iPhone apps and overbearing regulatory frameworks, the Square Mile had another operating system: basement stairs, expense accounts, and wine lists as thick as the Yellow Pages.

If you stepped off the Central Line at Bank on a hot Thursday in July 1994, the first thing that hit you was not cut grass, taxi fumes or the dank iron smell of the Underground. Instead, it was cheap cologne1, tobacco, ink and old City hands, pickled in claret and port, 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.

1 Cheap cologne is a matter of perspective. Out with Brut 33, Hai Karate and Denim; in with Jazz, Fahrenheit and Joop!

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.

The Evening Standard London Pub & Bar Guide 1999 named all five among its ten recommended theme bars for the capital — the closest thing to a contemporary consensus on which chains defined the era.

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.

Then and now

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.

Then and now

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.

Then and now

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.

Then and now

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.

Then and now

Slug & Lettuce deserves a footnote here too, not because it was born as a City wine bar, but because its nineties reinvention caught the same weather. After Grosvenor Inns acquired Fast Forward in 1992, the chain was pushed deliberately away from the old pub model: “more of a bar, less of a pub”, younger, more contemporary, less blokey, aiming for an even male-female crowd. Sheila McKenzie, already associated with the female-friendly Pitcher & Piano formula, helped steer that shift.

By 1995 it was being pitched as a “contemporary English bar” — somewhere between a continental café and a classic pub. By 1997 it saw All Bar One and Pitcher & Piano as direct competitors.

The name survived into the Stonegate era, but the original reforming edge became something flatter: more efficient, more repeatable, more profitable — but far less human.

The Fine Line belongs here as the brewer’s answer to all of it. Fuller’s opened the first one in Battersea in June 1998 and declined to call it a brand: a “concept”, they said, because the managers were left to run their own rooms. Three more followed by that September, five more in 1999, and by the summer of 2001 there were eight across London and a ninth in Bristol. Deep blue and purple sofas, pale polished wood, one cocktail list with room for local specials.

The Evening Standard went to Battersea that November and named the target without being asked: Fuller’s had taken “the basic principles of the All Bar One offering” and, the paper reckoned, improved them. Within a few weeks it was one of the busiest rooms in the area.

The hiring says the same thing in a colder way. The man running Fuller’s bars division had been operations manager at Pitcher & Piano. The Fine Line’s own operations manager came from All Bar One. Other staff came from Slug & Lettuce and Henry’s Café-Bars. A family brewer founded in 1845 did not wait to see whether the daylight bar would last; it bought the people who had built it.

Two of them are still trading in the Square Mile and neither is called the Fine Line any more. The Bow Churchyard café-bar opened in 1998 and is now The Saint. The Monument Street one opened in September 1999, carried the name for sixteen years, and became The Hydrant in 2015 — fire-brigade theming, craft keg, fifteen draught lines. Fuller’s still run both. The concept died; the rooms did not.

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.

The uniform, currency and pacing

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

How a ghost is made

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.

One address deserves to be told properly. 45 London Wall.

The unit ran as a W. Coates wine bar from the second half of the nineteenth century — one of two Coates sites in the City, alongside 109 Old Broad Street. When Corney & Barrow bought W. Coates in 1959, the London Wall room became part of the wine-merchant estate that would later become the C&B bar chain proper. By 1963, the basement had been repurposed as a Cold Luncheon Room — mahogany panelling, occasional gas jet, men only, priced for a conservative City lunch, with a wine shop attached so you could take home the bottle you'd opened.

By 1986 the same building was something else entirely. Corney & Barrow gutted the interior. It reopened in early October — “just over a fortnight ago” when Nigella Lawson visited it for The Spectator — as “the 21st century café.” Tchaik Chassey did the design: granite, maple, merbau, steel and primrose; a bar shaped like a Fifties carpet; a teeming restaurant beyond; and an overhead Telerate screen giving live foreign-exchange and bond prices. Lawson filed her verdict:

Here is a place made for the detritus of the Big Bang — in all its gruesome detail.

The lunch menu ran to £5 for two courses. The shop out front sold wine and “breakfast in a briefcase.” Champagne, Perrier, three courses and coffee for two came to £26.

The 21st century café did not survive the twentieth. By 1991, C&B had abandoned the Tchaik Chassey aspiration and rebooted the same room as a down-market Coates for the post-Big-Bang lad-culture era: lunchtime pizza, Young's Ordinary and Scrumpy Jack on cask, karaoke on Wednesdays and Fridays, disco on Thursdays. The Evening Standard London Pub & Bar Guide 1999 relayed a researcher's line, in the language of its time: “Essex nymphos by night and an easy place to pull on Thursdays.” Five years from Nigella Lawson's champagne-and-Perrier lunch to an Evening Standard researcher writing that sentence about the same address.

Coates closed at some point after that. The address passed through the 2000s as Mehek, an award-winning Indian restaurant — head chef Ashok Kumar, menus co-designed with Atul Kochhar, British Curry Award winner. Mehek closed around 2020.

Today, 45 London Wall is the Moorgate Post Office. Cash deposits, parcel drop-off, weekday 8-to-6.

That is the whole story in one address: a Victorian wine merchant's counter, a 1963 gents-only lunch room in the basement, a Tchaik Chassey Big Bang café with Madonna on one screen and market prices on another, a karaoke disco with cask Young's and lad-mag copy in its listing, an award-winning curry room, and finally somewhere to post a birthday card. The room is pinned in Ghost Hunter as our first anchor.

That is the shape of every honest ghost record: name, address, 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.

The 1990s City drinking boom was a snapshot of a London that was bolder, louder, wildly irresponsible and unapologetically hedonistic. It was an era when personal relationships outranked corporate balance sheets, and a solid working day could plausibly be concluded over a bottle of 1982 Saint-Émilion by 2:30 in the afternoon.

We are undoubtedly healthier, more productive, and less prone to disastrous trading errors today. But as you sip your sparkling mineral water and glance around an empty office at 5:30 on a Friday afternoon, it's hard not to feel a tiny, shameful pang of nostalgia for the days when a mahogany staircase led down to a smoke-filled room where the claret never ran dry.

PINtPOINT cannot bring that world back, but it can show where the traces remain.

Ghosts confirmed in the 1999 book, pinned as a Curated Collection: Old Haunts of the Square Mile.

Companion essay: The Geography of Sobriety — why this whole world died, and how Wapping and Canary Wharf finished the job.

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