PINtPRESSNote5 May 2026 · Updated 3 November 2026 · London · Opening

The Whippet at Liverpool Street

The Whippet opened just outside Liverpool Street Station on 14 May 2026, the first new site under that name since the Holborn Whippet closed in December 2020.

This is the new venue from Bloomsbury Leisure Group, the team behind the Euston Tap. The soft launch ran on 14 May 2026 from around 4pm, with the full opening shortly after. The group already runs specialist rooms across London, Manchester and Bristol.

The name carries a local history. Bloomsbury and Holborn parishes had a 19th-century habit of following an afternoon of whippet racing with ale and a plate of coal-grilled meats. The original Holborn site stitched that into its identity: cask from small breweries, a coal grill, a basement room for food and games. The pool, food and entertainment at EC2 follow the same pattern.

The closure wasn't voluntary either. The original traded for about eight and a half years on Sicilian Avenue before folding in December 2020, displaced when the Holborn Links Estate changed hands. In late 2024 the group teased a four-times-larger "Whippet 2.0" for High Holborn. It didn't happen. EC2 is the plan that landed.

The original Holborn Whippet built a loyal following of its own and left enough of an impression that this does not feel like a name pulled from thin air. EC2 feels more like the return of a line that was cut short, and for people who remember the Holborn site properly, that gives it a little more emotional charge than the average new-bar opening.

The opening line-up

A lot of new London bars open with the same generic promise: good drinks, nice room, central location, maybe some food, maybe some music, maybe a "curated" list that turns out to be three lagers, one hazy IPA, and a negroni on draft.

The operator's own framing, from a general-manager job ad posted before the opening: "a brand-new pub … built around one simple idea: exceptionally well-kept cask ale and perfectly poured pints." The role spec lists "proven cellar management experience (essential)" and "strong cask ale knowledge" ahead of the usual hospitality boilerplate.

The group named its opening brewery line-up on the @WhippetEC2 account: Green Duck, Bristol Beer Factory, Joseph Holt, Floc, Otter, Ossett and Boddingtons. The phrase they used was that these are breweries "generally locked out of the big chains in London": independent regional producers that most City drinkers cannot get pouring within walking distance of their office.

The boards confirmed more breadth than the launch teaser implied. By early June the keg list included Bitburger Pils, Pivo Kutna Hora Czech Pils, Tegernseer Hell, Benediktiner Hell and Sapporo. Beamish is on draft too, the Cork stout that has been competing with Guinness since 1792, and sister site The Bolter has poured it since February. The food is gyoza, where the original Holborn site had coal-grilled meats.

Another station-side beer bar

Their formula is station-pub specialist beer, with Taps outside major stations in two cities: Euston, Waterloo, Farringdon and Aldgate in London, and Piccadilly, Victoria and Oxford Road in Manchester. The Whippet directly outside Liverpool Street is the first time they've run that play under the Whippet name rather than the Tap name.

The formula has heritage. The original Euston Tap opened on Bonfire Night 2010 as a joint venture between Bloomsbury Leisure and Jamie Hawksworth of Pivovar, the Yorkshire group that already ran Sheffield Tap and Pivní York and effectively invented the rail-adjacent Northern Tap concept. The two groups co-owned Euston Tap for years. Bloomsbury runs it solo today and built the rest of the Tap family from the playbook the partnership left them.

The Euston Tap is a tiny room with a huge reputation, the kind of place that helped teach London drinkers that station drinking did not have to mean compromise.

Liverpool Street has places to drink by the dozen and very few that people feel attached to. A beer-led bar directly outside one of the busiest stations in the country can be more than a commuter convenience: somewhere you meet before heading east, or stop on the way home instead of defaulting to the first available pint.

The lager list and Boddingtons are doing different jobs here

The original Augustiner teaser told one story. The June board tells a better one. The famous Munich badge is not on the bar, but the lager run is Bitburger Pils, Pivo Kutna Hora, Sapporo, Tegernseer Hell, Benediktiner. Five of the ten keg lines: a German pils, a Czech pils, two Hells (only one of them brewed in Bavaria) and a Japanese rice lager. The usual ratio at a craft-leaning City bar is two safe imports, both there to keep the office crowd comfortable. The Whippet more than doubles that and reaches wider.

And the June board isn't the first version of this. The launch-week list, three weeks earlier, ran Bitburger, Sapporo, Tegernseer, Bohemia Regent, and Moretti: five of ten keg lines, all continental. Same ratio. Two have rotated out since. Bohemia Regent → Pivo Kutna Hora: a Czech-pils-for-Czech-pils swap, but Kutna Hora is the more highly regarded of the two. Moretti → Benediktiner Hell swaps an Italian lager for a Hell brewed under licence for the Bavarian monastery at Ettal. Three weeks in, the lager list had tightened.

And the lagers arrive in their own branded glassware. Benediktiner Hell in the Benediktiner glass with the monk badge. Tegernseer Hell in the HTB crown-and-cross. Sapporo in the star glass. Most "craft" bars that carry continental lagers serve everything in a generic shaker pint, because branded glassware is cellar-storage hassle and the bar's identity is meant to live above any one badge. Here there are three brewery glasses, stocked and rotated for three lagers on the same bar, so each beer arrives the way its home brewery serves it.

Boddingtons cask with a sparkler tells a different story. Sparkler-on cask service is a Northern-English signature, almost never poured in London, a small piece of plastic on the end of a hand-pump that has been splitting British cask drinkers for 140 years. Choosing it for an opening line-up in EC2 will not please everybody. The cask itself, the venue's tap list confirms, is brewed on contract by J.W. Lees in Middleton, a family brewer, rather than at AB InBev scale. The second handpull is pouring Timothy Taylor's Boltmaker, CAMRA's Champion Beer of Britain in 2014, alongside it. The brewery's four-time winner is Landlord. Even so, Boltmaker and Boddingtons on adjacent handpulls is a much stronger cask statement than Boddingtons on its own.

The craft side hasn't been left to drift either. The June keg list carries Deya Steady Rolling Man, The Kernel Pale Ale, and Howling Hops NEIPA alongside the lager run.

London has plenty of excellent beer bars, but not many that cut across cask drinkers, lager traditionalists and modern craft drinkers without becoming muddled. The Whippet manages it.

Last pour, first pour

Untappd keeps the RSS archive for closed venues, which means the final pint poured at the original Holborn Whippet is still on record. It was a Cold Spark by Big Smoke Brew, logged at 19:13 on Friday 11 December 2020. Eight days before London was ordered into Tier 4.

The bar said on 13 May that the Norman Cornish prints that hung in the original Holborn room are now going up on the EC2 walls, a few weeks after opening. Cornish was the Durham painter of working men's pub and street scenes, the mood the original Whippet quietly built its room around. Different walls, same pictures.

The Whippet opened from around 4pm on Thursday 14 May, standing room only that first night, with the fixed seating arriving the Friday. Five and a half years after that final pull, there is a first pour again under the same name, a short walk from where the last one happened.

Sit down if you can. The beer is the same either way, but the pint reads better from a chair.

The Whippet is outside Liverpool Street Station, EC2. @WhippetEC2 posts the bar.

Companion piece: UK Oktoberfest Events 2026.