Venues in South Bank
The South Bank puts the river in the room — riverside dining rooms and converted industrial spaces, most of them looking back across the water at the skyline.
Oudh 1722
South Bank — Indian Restaurant
Aktar Islam's Awadhi restaurant in a listed Union Street townhouse near Borough Market, from an open-kitchen dining room to a top-floor cocktail bar.
Skylon
South Bank — British Restaurant & Bar
Up to 500 guests
A riverside restaurant and bar on the third floor of the Royal Festival Hall, reopened in 2025 with interiors by Conran & Partners and Thames views from every table.
OMA
South Bank — Greek Restaurant
David Carter's Greek restaurant above Borough Market — the UK's first Greek MICHELIN star, with a wine-lined dining room, raw-bar counter and a covered market-view terrace.
Restaurant Story
South Bank — Modern British Restaurant
Up to 70 guests
Tom Sellers' two-Michelin-star tasting-menu restaurant near Tower Bridge, rebuilt in 2024 with an open-kitchen chef's table and available for private hire across three floors.
Akara
South Bank — West African Restaurant
Up to 40 guests
A West African restaurant from Akoko's Aji Akokomi, set in a Borough Yards railway arch, with a mezzanine private dining room and full exclusive hire.
Sollip
South Bank — Korean Restaurant
Up to 30 guests
A Michelin-starred Korean-French tasting-menu restaurant near London Bridge, its calm pale-wood dining room available for exclusive private use.
Trivet
South Bank — Modern European Restaurant
Up to 70 guests
Jonny Lake and Isa Bal's two-Michelin-star restaurant near London Bridge, with a private dining room, a marble wine bar and a covered terrace for exclusive hire.
Lyaness
South Bank — Cocktail Bar
Up to 150 guests
Ryan Chetiyawardana's riverside cocktail bar at Sea Containers London, set in electric blue around a green marble counter with Thames views toward St Paul's.
Sea Containers London
South Bank — Hotel
Up to 300 guests
A Tom Dixon-designed riverside hotel on the South Bank with intimate event spaces: a velvet screening room, a panelled private dining room with its own terrace, the Lyaness cocktail bar and the 12th Knot rooftop over the Thames.
Shangri-La The Shard, London
South Bank — Hotel
Up to 200 guests
Eighteen floors of Renzo Piano's Shard, from a ballroom on level 34 to the highest hotel bar in western Europe on level 52.
TĪNG Restaurant
South Bank — Pan-Asian Restaurant
Up to 200 guests
Pan-Asian dining on level 35 of The Shard, with private dining rooms from an intimate ten to a 200-guest buyout.
GŎNG
South Bank — Cocktail Bar
Up to 90 guests
Level 52 of The Shard: the highest hotel bar in Western Europe, a cocktail lounge, champagne bar and interior Sky Pool wrapped in glass above the Thames.
/ About South Bank▾
The South Bank was rebuilt as a cultural quarter for the Festival of Britain in 1951, a national exhibition staged on cleared riverside land to mark recovery after the war. Its only permanent building was the Royal Festival Hall, opened that May and still the anchor of the Southbank Centre. Over the following decades the site grew into one of London's largest arts complexes, gaining the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Purcell Room and the Hayward Gallery in the Brutalist idiom of the 1960s, all set along a single stretch of the Thames.
The National Theatre, Denys Lasdun's terraced concrete building completed in 1976, stands just downstream of Waterloo Bridge and is among the most admired Brutalist works in Britain, its foyers and terraces opening to the river. Nearby sits BFI Southbank, successor to the National Film Theatre first opened in 1951, tucked beneath Waterloo Bridge. Between them the riverside offers a run of concert halls, theatres, gallery spaces and open terraces — contemporary rooms with Thames frontage that little of central London can match.
The defining feature is the river itself. The Queen's Walk runs the length of the bank, giving open views across the Thames to Westminster and the City, and the London Eye — raised for the millennium and opened in 2000 — turns slowly above it. Rooftops and upper terraces trade on the same outlook. Waterloo, London's busiest railway terminus, lies just behind, with Waterloo Underground on the Jubilee, Northern and Bakerloo lines and Embankment across the footbridge — making the South Bank one of the most reachable riverside settings in the capital.