Venues in Clerkenwell
Clerkenwell is art-led and craft-led in equal measure — former workshops, Georgian rooms and a dining scene that has never needed the West End.
Vesper
Clerkenwell — British Restaurant
Jackson Boxer's Exmouth Market corner restaurant, a critical hit since opening in May 2026, with whitewashed brick, a zinc bar and a candlelit dining room behind it.
Restaurant St Barts
Clerkenwell — British Restaurant
Up to 45 guests
A one-MICHELIN-Star British tasting-menu restaurant in Smithfield, overlooking the cloisters of London's oldest church, with a MICHELIN Green Star for its seasonal, nose-to-tail cooking.
Sessions Arts Club
Clerkenwell — Mediterranean Restaurant
Up to 100 guests
The old judges' dining room of a 1782 Clerkenwell courthouse, kept in its stripped plaster and candlelight and hung with art. Hired whole, for up to 100.
Luca
Clerkenwell — Italian Restaurant
Up to 30 guests
A Modern Italian in a Grade II listed Clerkenwell building, with a planted glass-roofed terrace and three private rooms for hire.
The Quality Chop House
Clerkenwell — British Restaurant
A Victorian chophouse on Farringdon Road, trading since 1869, with a first-floor private room for up to fourteen. Contemporary British cooking and a serious, Burgundy-led wine list.
Moro
Clerkenwell — Spanish Restaurant
Up to 110 guests
A Sam and Sam Clark institution on Exmouth Market since 1997, cooking from Spain, Morocco and the Sahara. Private dining for up to 32, or the whole restaurant for 110.
St. JOHN
Clerkenwell — British Restaurant
Up to 150 guests
The Fergus Henderson nose-to-tail institution, in a whitewashed former Smithfield smokehouse since 1994. A 16-seat private room, or exclusive hire of the whole restaurant and bar with space to dance.
/ About Clerkenwell▾
Clerkenwell begins in the monastic ground north-west of the City wall. In the twelfth century the Knights Hospitaller founded the Priory of St John here, and its south gate — St John's Gate, rebuilt by Prior Thomas Docwra in 1504 — still spans the lane, housing the Museum of the Order of St John. A Benedictine nunnery gave the district its holy well and its name. From the eighteenth century Clerkenwell became the centre of English clock and watchmaking; by the 1790s several thousand of its people worked the trade, in the top-floor workshops still recognisable by their wide windows.
Printing, brewing and metalwork followed, and the sturdy workshops they left behind now house one of the densest concentrations of architecture and design studios in Europe. That craft lineage surfaces each May at Clerkenwell Design Week, when showrooms and courtyards across EC1 open to the trade. Event spaces run from those converted industrial floors to older survivals: the Charterhouse, a Carthusian monastery of 1371 turned almshouse on its own quiet square, keeps rooms and a museum. Brick, cast iron and north light recur as the setting.
Exmouth Market, a semi-pedestrianised street trading since the 1890s, anchors the dining, its restaurants and stalls gathered before the Italianate church of Our Most Holy Redeemer. St John, on St John Street, has served nose-to-tail cooking since 1994. Charterhouse Square and the green of Spa Fields give the district room to breathe. Farringdon station sits at the southern edge, one of London's rare interchanges of Underground, Thameslink and — since 2022 — the Elizabeth line, putting Clerkenwell minutes from the West End, the City and the airports.