Lowri Griffiths on pop-up bars in Bedford Square Gardens and the specific chaos of a private park full of Londoners with tokens
Bedford Square Gardens is normally locked, gated, residents-only, the kind of London green space you walk past and wonder who on earth has the key. So when Cocktails in the City took it over for the weekend, twenty of the capital’s best bars setting up shop inside a park I’ve never once been allowed into, I was always going to say yes.
The Tokens System, Explained Badly By Me
You buy tokens, you exchange tokens for drinks, and the maths of this system completely falls apart after your third cocktail, which is presumably the entire point. I genuinely could not tell you how many tokens I had left at any given moment after about seven o’clock. I just kept handing them over hopefully and it kept working.
The Actual Drinks
Genuinely inventive stuff, nothing like your standard bar menu. There was a smoked something involving actual smoke under a glass dome, which felt slightly excessive for a Tuesday but I was not about to complain. Another bar had done something clever with clarified milk punch that I still don’t fully understand but would drink again immediately.
Meeting People In A Gated Park
There’s something about being let into a normally-locked garden that makes strangers chattier than usual, like we’d all been granted access to a secret and needed to discuss it. I ended up talking to a woman who works in set design for one of the West End shows, and a man who insisted, entirely unprompted, on explaining the correct way to garnish a negroni. I did not ask. He told me anyway.
The Following Morning
Not brilliant, if I’m honest. The smoked cocktail in particular did not agree with me the next day, though I maintain that was entirely my own fault for having a second one. Bedford Square Gardens, it turns out, does not care about your wellbeing after the fact. It just wants you to have a nice time while you’re in it.
Would I Go Again
Absolutely, and I’ve already told the woman from set design we should go together next time, assuming either of us remembers this conversation happened. That’s the real gamble of Cocktails in the City: you make brilliant new friends and immediately lose their contact details.