Cahoots

Cahoots occupies a disused underground station beneath Kingly Court, and it has played the same conceit straight since March 2015: a 1940s London that never quite ended, run by a band of black-market scoundrels. Two floors make up the Station. The Ticket Hall on Kingly Street is a ground-floor pub with a station clock, vintage adverts, high wooden tables and a terrace on the street. Below it sits the Underground, a pair of platforms, Northbound and Southbound, joined by a central passageway and reached down a wooden escalator past a set of ticket gates.

Northbound is the room most people picture. A long platform bar runs the length of it under an ALIGHT HERE sign, with a full-size 1940s tube carriage parked alongside, moquette seats and wooden trunks for tables. Southbound is the industrial half, a maze of switchboards, gauges and danger-marked levers reached by an out-of-bounds staircase. Live music runs several nights a week and a resident DJ plays Friday and Saturday until 2am.

The whole Station takes 320 across both floors and hires as one. Each part also hires on its own: the Underground whole at 220, Northbound at 150, the Ticket Hall with its terrace at 120, Southbound at 70, and the tube carriage for 30 as a semi-private table. Every space carries a club-grade in-house sound system and the house is comfortable with a guest DJ. The Underground sits below the street with no natural light, which is the practical reason it works for a late one.