Venues in The City
The City’s private dining rooms combine historic weight with modern design — confident spaces for occasions that mean business.
Restaurant St Barts
The City — 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.
Guildhall
The City — Event Space
Up to 900 guests
The City's civic hall, where the Great Hall has staged the Lord Mayor's Banquet since 1502 and takes 900 for a reception. Corporate hire only, across eight spaces from a medieval crypt to a Roman amphitheatre.
Tallow Chandlers' Hall
The City — Event Space
Up to 120 guests
A City livery hall on Dowgate Hill dating to 1672, with an oak-panelled Livery Hall, a seventeenth-century Parlour, a Stuart Court Room and a restored courtyard, available for private hire.
The Lookout
The City — Event Space
Up to 250 guests
The 50th-floor viewing gallery at 8 Bishopsgate, closed to the public in the evenings for dinners of 130 and receptions of 250.
Hawksmoor Guildhall
The City — Steak Restaurant & Bar
Up to 140 guests
Hawksmoor's largest London site, a reclaimed City chophouse of oxblood leather and mahogany, with private rooms and a full-restaurant buyout for up to 140.
The Libertine
The City — British Restaurant & Bar
Up to 450 guests
A bar and restaurant in the Grade I listed vaults beneath The Royal Exchange, on the site where Britain's first royal alcohol licence was granted. Five hireable spaces below ground, from a ten-seat whiskey alcove to the full site at 450 standing.
Fortnum's Bar & Restaurant at The Royal Exchange
The City — British Restaurant & Bar
Up to 450 guests
Fortnum's bar and restaurant occupies the courtyard floor of the Royal Exchange, under the glazed roof of the 1844 building. Let whole or in half, with a terrace at Bank.
Sky Garden
The City — Event Space
Up to 700 guests
London's highest public garden, atop the Walkie Talkie, with rooftop bars, restaurants and a glass-domed atrium that turns into a striking private event space.
Stationers' Hall
The City — Event Space
Up to 450 guests
A 1673 livery hall by St Paul's: stained glass, a minstrels' gallery and a walled garden, taking 450 for a reception.
Saddlers' Hall
The City — Event Space
Up to 250 guests
A City livery hall off Cheapside, its chandeliered Great Hall, courtyard and interconnecting Front Rooms opened for private hire by the Worshipful Company of Saddlers.
The Ned
The City — Members' Club
Up to 200 guests
Six Grade I-listed event rooms on the restored sixth floor of Lutyens' former Midland Bank, from intimate panelled dining rooms to the 200-capacity Tapestry Room.
Lucky Cat by Gordon Ramsay – 22 Bishopsgate
The City — Asian Restaurant & Bar
Up to 300 guests
Gordon Ramsay's Tokyo-inspired Asian eating house and late bar on Level 60 of 22 Bishopsgate, the highest restaurant in Europe, with a 3am licence and nightly DJs.
/ About The City▾
The City of London — the Square Mile — traces its outline to Roman Londinium, founded around AD 47, whose landward wall still shapes the boundary two thousand years on. The medieval street pattern of lanes, courts and alleys survived even the Great Fire of 1666, which gutted the old city inside those walls and took most of its churches and livery halls with it. From the rebuilding rose Christopher Wren's St Paul's Cathedral, its dome still holding the skyline among the towers. It is a place of sharp contrasts, dense with history underfoot and notably quiet at weekends.
The event character follows that old-and-new grain. More than a hundred livery companies keep halls here, many rebuilt after the Fire and again after the Blitz, panelled and hung with civic silver. Guildhall, the City's ceremonial seat for some six centuries, anchors the formal end. Above them stand the towers and their sky bars: the Gherkin at 30 St Mary Axe, designed by Norman Foster and opened in 2004, and the Sky Garden atop 20 Fenchurch Street, a public glasshouse opened in 2015 with long views across the river. Few areas hold medieval and vertical London so close together.
Leadenhall Market, a covered Victorian arcade of 1881 on the site of the Roman forum, threads the eastern lanes with restaurants and wine bars, while the churchyards and pocket gardens offer rare open ground. Dining runs from panelled City institutions to the towers' upper-floor rooms. Transport is dense: Bank and Liverpool Street on the Underground, Cannon Street and Fenchurch Street for the south-east, and the Elizabeth line calling at Liverpool Street and nearby Farringdon. After dark the Square Mile empties, leaving the floodlit dome and the lit towers to those who stay.