Last orders? A wave of closures hits London's booziest neighbourhood
Last orders? A wave of closures hits London's booziest neighbourhood
Brewers on the Bermondsey Beer Mile are closing up shop — what’s going on?
Morning — hitting up every boozer on a Bermondsey Beer Mile crawl is no mean feat but, in 2023, running the gauntlet is slightly different to what it once was. More brewers have left the Mile this year than in any year since the first moved in. What’s to blame? And who’s taking their place? The Spy investigates trouble and churn on the Beer Mile after your Sunday roundup below.
Plus: a council whodunnit, tap water shaming, and the mystery of London’s bendy buses.
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What we’ve spied
⛺️ A right mess over in Bloomsbury, after a council and hospital were caught out hiring a bin lorry to destroy homeless tents. Things kicked off when a video went viral last Friday showing refuse workers loading a tent into a rubbish compactor outside University College Hospital, where several people had been rough sleeping. Police had also been in attendance during the clearance. One rough sleeper caught up in it told ITV news he had lost “everything”, explaining: "My clothing, everything from the past 23 years, all my belongings, is away...is gone". After initial denials, Camden council eventually fessed up on Tuesday, explaining UCH had asked police to disperse rough sleepers, and that the council had arranged the bin lorry. Council leader Georgia Gould later said: ”These are not Camden’s values … I am sorry this happened.” The whole debacle was given extra heat by recent comments by the now ex-home secretary Suella Braverman that homelessness is a ‘lifestyle choice’ and that tents on streets should be banned.
💧 “We’re running a restaurant, not a charity — wink, wink,” are words a London restaurant probably now lives to regret, after being accused of guilt-tripping orders for tap water. Danish steakhouse Köd in Spitalfields has come under fire for the note on its menu that called out diners who only order tap water with their meals, with the note adding: “If you want to have just tap water, we encourage you to donate £1 to Red Cross. Everybody wins”. In defence, owner Morten Ortwed told the Standard: “If we are to continue and employ staff, people can’t only order tap water”. Others haven’t been so understanding, and have refused to order extra drinks at the steakhouse in protest.
👵 Boomers refusing or unable to downsize their London pads are in the spotlight. New research from property site Zoopla finds that over a third of over-65s in the capital admit they have a home “bigger than they need”, and on average this older generation of Londoners live in a three bedroom home, with 1.3 spare bedrooms each. As to why they aren’t downsizing, Zoopla’s survey found 40% had never considered it, 14% had decided against it, 10% said they’d downsized but still had too much room, and 27% said they were considering downsizing. One in four also said having the ability to host Christmas was another reason for keeping their extra space.
🏠 One other bit on housing: Sadiq Khan has unveiled a big push to convert private houses into council houses in the capital. The London mayor’s Council Homes Acquisition Programme (CHAP) is giving councils new powers and funds that he hopes will bring 10,000 homes onto public books.
👮♂️ Two big stories to know about London’s police this week:
Several Met officers are being investigated over failings in the case of serial killer Stephen Port. Port is currently serving life in prison for the murders of four men he killed in glaringly similar circumstances in the 2010s, drugging them with overdoses and then dumping their bodies near his east London flat. Family and friends of the victims have long believed the Met missed chances to spot Port’s pattern, accusing the force of being blinded by prejudice and homophobia. On Thursday the Independent Office for Police Conduct said eight officers are being investigated for possible breaches of police professional standards on diversity and equality in relation to the case.
An internal Met report has been unearthed that suggested a senior officer tasked with finding Stephen Lawrence’s racist killers was corrupt. For years the Met has denied dodgy officers played a part in holding back the investigation into the 1993 murder of Lawrence, an 18-year-old black man who was attacked by four assailants while waiting for a bus in Eltham, south London. But this week the BBC said it has uncovered a report written by the force’s own anti-corruption unit back in 2000 that suggests Ray Adams, a commander who worked on the Lawrence case, wasn’t squeaky clean. Adams, now retired, denies the allegations.
🗳️ Much attention on which of London’s MPs backed a Gaza ceasefire vote in parliament this week. Around a third of Labour MPs in the capital — 15 out of 46 — voted in favour of the SNP amendment, defying orders from leader Sir Keir Starmer to abstain and instead back a motion calling for a humanitarian pause. That included Andy Slaughter, MP for Hammersmith, who’s now lost his job in the shadow cabinet as solicitor general over the vote. Keeping her job as a shadow business minister was Bethnal Green and Bow MP Rushanara Ali, who abstained — but she’s faced the wrath of pro-Palestine protesters instead. Around 200 gathered outside her constituency office in Tower Hamlets on Thursday, chanting “shame on you”. All three of the capital’s Liberal Democrat MPs backed the ceasefire vote, and none of the 21 Conservatives backed it. Speaking of the Tories: Rishi Sunak picked Chelsea and Fulham MP Greg Hands as his new minister for London during this week’s cabinet reshuffle, replacing Paul Scully, who’d had a bit of a falling out with his party over the upcoming mayoral election.
🏳️🌈 One in five LGBTQ+ people have experienced hate crime while travelling on London public transport in the past year, new research finds. The survey, conducted by transport watchdog London TravelWatch, also found two thirds of LGBTQ+ people felt there was always a threat of violence or harassment while travelling, and that most of those who’d experience a hate crime had not been helped by bystanders. In reaction to the research, TfL stressed it was committed to keeping passengers and staff safe. Another dark tale from the Tube: an attempted murder investigation is underway after a man tried to push a woman onto the tracks at Leicester Square on November 6. On a more positive note: upgraded Central line trains are now out in the wild for their final tests.
📣 A rare contribution by Evening Standard owner Evgeny Lebedev in the House of Lords this week — only his second since he was made a peer by long-term pal Boris Johnson in 2020. In the gushing words of his own paper, Lord Lebedev gave a “passionate” contribution on the importance of free speech. It’s a bit of a pet project for the Russian-born tycoon at the moment — if you’ve grabbed a copy of the Standard in the past week or so, you’ll have seen interviews with Jordan Peterson and Azealia Banks as well as an op-ed from Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, all hailing the merits of free speech and railing against cancel culture. Hopefully Lebedev’s getting his money’s worth — at the end of August it was revealed he’s had to cough up millions more in loans to keep the loss-making paper afloat.
🌳 West London residents are being asked to lend a council their cash to boost greenery. This week Hammersmith and Fulham council announced it was setting up a green investment fund for sprucing up the borough’s parks and encourage more cycling. Residents are being invited to put money into the scheme for five years, with a fixed return of 4.85% interest, the council said.
🔍 And finally, we leave you with:
The reopening of David Bowie’s and Francis Bacon’s old haunt in Soho
A middle aged gent pelting it on rollerblades through central London
A viral bike-riding cat getting hit by a moped in Farringdon (the cat is fine)
The bike racks going missing on Mile End because they weren’t screwed in properly
Answers on the fate of London’s bendy buses
The Accidentally Wes Anderson exhibition that opened in Kensington this week
A guide to ‘building a London borough’ from scratch, as Waltham Forest did
Archeological finds from a Victorian warehouse in St Pancras
News HMV is reopening its flagship Oxford Street store next week
Trouble and churn on the Beer Mile
Of all the leavers from the Bermondsey Beer Mile this year, Hawkes, a cider brewery, made the punchiest exit. In a statement published last week, its owner, Brewdog, took a swipe at its landlord, blaming “exorbitant rent increases” for the departure, along with a “slowdown in trade”.
2023 has brought troubling times to the Beer Mile, long cherished as one of the best boozy crawls London has to offer. Aside from Hawkes, three other brewers have closed or moved away in the past couple of months, the most leavers ever in one year, by the Spy’s count.
New faces are taking their place, though, and the Mile remains one of south London’s most buzzing spots for a night out — a fact that peeves off some locals, who’ve at times compared it to living next to Ibiza. But veterans of the strip tell the Spy the Mile is changing — less beery, and a greater emphasis on selling booze rather than brewing it. All the while a new, private owner of the Mile’s railway arches has been quietly fiddling with rents since it bought the arches off Network Rail in 2019.
“One thing that is visible now is that the places to drink still here in Bermondsey are almost all bars or taprooms that are not linked directly to an onsite production facility,” Evin O'Riordain, the founder of The Kernel, told the Spy. “It did feel more engaging when you got to visit and drink in the place where your beer was made.”
The Kernel was the first brewery to move into the Mile in 2009 at the start of London’s brewing revolution in the 2010s. Craft enthusiasts will know the brewery from the distinctive brown label on its bottles. After The Kernel, the Mile kept growing organically and today makes up around 30 establishments, dotted mostly along Druid Street and Enid Street.
But the Mile is only a loose amalgamation of boozers and eateries — no single organisation officially represents the strip. Instead the best unofficial account comes from two long-time fans who go by the pseudonyms Spank The Monkey and The Belated Birthday Girl (STM & BBG). They run a website that acts as a central resource for Mile fans, offering their own recommended route for crawlers and documenting the businesses coming and going.
STM & BBG agreed with O'Riordain in conversation with the Spy: “When we started visiting the Mile a decade or so ago, there were only six breweries on it — and they were all brewing on site. As it's expanded, the focus has changed to taprooms and barrel stores for breweries located elsewhere, or bars serving beers from multiple sources.”
One reason may be rent, a factor that particularly affects booze production, according to O'Riordain. The big draw for brewers to the Mile was the railway arches, which have a size and temperature well suited for beer production. But these days “it’s definitely cheaper to run a brewery not in the centre of London,” O'Riordain says.
Indeed, all of the Mile’s leavers this year had been brewing on the strip, and at least two have publicly blamed their exit on rent. Hawkes initially closed for refurbishment earlier this year, but in the end never reopened. The brewery had opened on the Mile in 2017, making it the first urban cidery in all of London, and was soon snapped up by craft behemoth Brewdog the next year. But on November 8, Brewdog confirmed a permanent closure, with a spokesperson saying: “Unfortunately, the slowdown in trade on the Bermondsey Beer Mile, combined with exorbitant rent increases, has meant we have had to permanently close the much-loved Hawkes tap room. This also meant we ceased production on the site”.
An even older resident of the Mile also cited rent in its departure in March: Partizan, a beer microbrewery that moved in not long after The Kernel in 2012. “The rent in Bermondsey was eye-watering,” founder Andy Smith recently said in an interview, explaining why Partizan was relocating to Leicestershire. “Every year it’s been the same thing: ‘Perhaps we should move out of London?’ Usually the counter to that is twofold: the bar in Bermondsey, which brought a lot of money in, and staff, who live in London. The bar hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels and, heading into another tough year, we had much less staff than usual.”
The landlord in question for both brewers is The Arch Company (ArchCo), a relatively new player on the scene. In the Mile’s early days the railway arches had been owned by Network Rail but, in 2019, the public body completed a £1.46bn sale of thousands of arches across the UK to two big corporate players. These were Telereal Trillium, part of the London-based William Pears property empire, and Blackstone, the largest commercial landlord in history, who together formed ArchCo to manage their new portfolio. Many tenants at the time were concerned about what the sell-off would mean for their rent — so much so that they formed a tenancy association called Guardians of the Angels to protect their interests, off the back of a successful crowdfunding campaign. But today, Guardians has gone dark, last posting a statement on its website in 2021, while ArchCo has become the landlord for pretty much every brewer on the Mile.
ArchCo told the Spy it was “disappointed” it’d been unable to reach an agreement with Brewdog — but declined to detail what kind of rent increase it was proposing, saying the information was commercially sensitive. Likewise, a spokesperson for Brewdog said it wasn’t able to disclose the rent increase either. ArchCo also didn’t comment on claims from Partizan’s founder that the company had threatened to confiscate brewing equipment over a disagreement on rent.
But ArchCo’s online listings give a good sense of how prime the real estate on the Mile has become these days. Arches on the section of the strip on Druid Street are currently going for around £28 per square foot on average — or £42,000 a year for a 1,500 sqft arch. Rent for the same amount of space in Bethnal Green would be more like £37,000 a year, based on ArchCo’s listings online at the moment, and outside of London, in Birmingham, just £15,000. “Trade goes up and down on the Mile all the time, but rent just keeps going up,” explained STM & BBG.
But rent rises are only part of the changing picture on the Mile, and the other closures seen this year aren’t so neatly connected by the same thread. One of the other leavers has been Brew By Numbers, a craft beer darling that didn’t only move out of the Mile, but collapsed into administration. Another, the microbrewery Spartan, has yet to set up shop elsewhere. The immense financial difficulties of 2023 may have been a factor.
A spokesperson for the Campaign for Real Ales explained to us: “Despite its popularity, venues up and down the Bermondsey Beer Mile, much like pubs across the entirety of the UK, are merely treading water. The pub, brewing and cider making industries are being battered by the perfect storm of concurrent crises, which threatens to drown many pubs, social clubs and taprooms.
“Pubs are fighting to survive against a tide of rising costs of goods and employing staff, government help with business rates being cut, and customers continuing to tighten their belts due to the cost-of-living crisis.”
And yet, despite the difficult context, new businesses have been coming to Mile this past year too. Battersea Brewery is moving into Spartan’s old unit, its first new spot since opening by the revamped power station. A specialist importer of Dutch beer, Dutch Drinks, recently opened up on the Mile. And even a brewer of sake — Japanese rice wine — is joining the strip, called KANPAI.
“We've enjoyed many an afternoon on the Beer Mile over the years, always soaking in the atmosphere and admiring the craft of locally made drinks. Back then it was always a pipe dream that felt out of reach to have something of our own along the Mile,” co-founder Lucy told us. She started KANPAI with her husband Tom in Peckham after they got into sake brewing as a hobby, and the pair recently finished their move to Bermondsey, where they’ll be producing British-style rice wine in their arch on Druid Street.
She added: “The plethora of producers and taprooms is why we wanted to be on the Mile. The area attracts an open-minded (and thirsty!) audience — people willing to try something new. We're excited to offer something slightly different to mix up the tradition on the Beer Mile. We say sake is ‘brewed like a beer and enjoyed like a wine’.”
It's new openings like these that keep STM & BBG optimistic. “This year we've had four breweries close, true, but at the same time four bars have opened, including one that Battersea Brewery plans to start making beer in,” they said. “Despite the problems with rent increases, people still want to open up businesses there.”
As to the future — one constraint to the Mile’s development will always be the locals. A campaign to pedestrianise the strip back during the pandemic was met with heavy resistance from neighbours, who feared overspills of rowdy drinkers. They may welcome news the Mile is diversifying away beer, if it means fewer stag dos. The other big question mark though is how much further rent in the railway arches could climb. Back when it first took over, ArchCo published a tenants charter that aimed to reassure businesses in the arches that it would be a responsible landlord. Missing, though, was any universal guarantee about rent hikes.
An ArchCo spokesperson said: “The Bermondsey arches are home to around 30 eating and drinking establishments, which has remained broadly the same since we acquired the estate in 2019.
“We never like to lose a customer and always try to reach an agreement that enables them to stay in their premises. We are therefore disappointed that we were unable to reach an agreement with Brewdog.
“Demand for our railway arch spaces in Bermondsey remains strong with five new premises that serve alcohol opening or about to open in the past year alone.”
Köd is not a plucky little local business. Its an international chain of generic «steakhouse conceptt» restaurant. They have got at least three of these in different towns in denmark, and three in Norway.
Shame on them for operating a deceptive shaver/razor blade pricing strategy where they pretend the food is cheaper than they want to charge, to get you in the door, then present you with an expensive drinks menu.
Who needs Metro and Evening Standard? Spy’s got it covered! Sadly the values of local and national politicians ate not in line or even close to what they do in reality. How they trashed the rough sleepers tent and belongings is beyond me. It’s hard work helping rough sleepers as every time I try I find impossible and outright stupid red tape standing the way. The situation is desperately getting worse.