Try this City of London rooftop bar to cool off after boiling hot office days August 26, 2025 Our Toast the City Awards are celebrating the City’s top spots and takes place this October. This week: Wagtail rooftop bar and restaurant. During some months there are more Google searches for ‘London rooftop bars’ than ‘new London bars’ – and that’s true even in winter. It’s just one sign that the capital’s intense love-in with sky-high [...]
Toast the City: Dine in a former bear pit at Libertine at the Royal Exchange August 21, 2025 Our Toast the City Awards are celebrating the City’s top spots and takes place this October. This week: Libertine at the Royal Exchange. The newly-opened Libertine restaurant at the Royal Exchange is allegedly where bears were kept. I was skeptical until the lady behind the bar told me the whole story, then a waiter corroborated it, and [...]
How the Barbican Theatre has rivalled the West End for four decades August 21, 2025 Our Toast the City Awards are celebrating the City’s top spots and takes place this October. This week: the Barbican Theatre. Think of the Barbican Centre and you might picture the lakeside suntrap or Brutalist passageways that feel purposefully designed to get lost in. You might not immediately think of the Barbican Theatre, but here’s why you [...]
Lunchtime Tourism: London’s amazing Temple of Mithras August 20, 2025 The City of London is one fifth Roman. The Londinium that was founded 2000 years ago lasted just over 400 years, and gave us (amongst other things) London’s first private members’ club, The Temple of Mithras. And it’s still here. The Walbrook Club is one of the City’s most exclusive hangouts but right opposite is [...]
Eat, Drink, Sleep, Repeat: The best London and New York restaurants August 20, 2025 Our Toast the City judge Martin Williams gives his bi-weekly opinion on all things dining. This week he splits his time between London and New York. There has been a good amount of excitement in the hospitality sector as of late, with JKS and Dishoom both heading to America on expansion trails. Last weekend I, [...]
Inside Finsbury Circus Gardens, the City’s biggest green space August 20, 2025 Our Toast the City Awards are celebrating the City’s top spots and takes place this October. This week: the redesigned Finsbury Circus Gardens. If the Square Mile were to be designed today, it would feature a lot more green space. It wasn’t until the middle of the last century that architects realised the importance of nature in [...]
Why Artillery Lane is the City of London’s most charming street August 20, 2025 Our Toast the City Awards are celebrating the City’s top spots and takes place this October. This week: the bars and restaurants of Artillery Lane and Passage. Broadgate’s skyscrapers are so tall and imposing that it can feel overwhelming casting your eye upwards. Head from here into the bowels of Victorian London by way of Artillery Lane, [...]
The incredible Barbican Centre bar with naughty, late-night energy August 19, 2025 Our Toast the City Awards will celebrate the City’s top spots and takes place this October. This week: the Martini Bar at the Barbican. Think of the Barbican Centre and Brutalist architecture and great sprawling public spaces come to mind. Inside and out, it is more about scope than intimacy, except for the Martini Bar. [...]
Toast the City: Brigadiers is a culinary playground for adults August 19, 2025 To get you in the mood for out Toast the City Awards celebrating everything that makes the Square Mile great, we’re celebrating some of the City’s top spots. This week: Brigadiers. Brigadiers is a strange proposition, a sports bar-cum-Indian barbecue inspired by the wood panelled army bars of the sub-continent but housed in the polished [...]
Lunchtime Tourism: Is there a better City green space than the Garden at 120? August 18, 2025 To get you in the mood for out Toast the City Awards celebrating everything that makes the Square Mile great, we asked a professional tour guide to recommend his favourite City spots. “The first weeks of August,” said American writer Natalie Babbitt, “hang at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, [...]