Morten Andersen will say it plainly: The Refinery is a bar and restaurant first and a sports venue second. On a marquee weekend, though, the Southwark Street terrace earns its place in this guide, and the room behind it knows how to pour.
The Refinery sits at 110 Southwark Street, two minutes from Tate Modern and a short walk from both Southwark and London Bridge stations. It opened in 2008 as the first venue from Drake and Morgan, the group that went on to run a dozen sites across the City and the West End (Drake and Morgan). That makes it the brand's testing ground, and the original is still the most relaxed of the set.
This is not a screens-on-every-wall sports bar. The draw on a big fixture is the outdoor terrace overlooking Southwark Street, which the venue turns over to live sport and, in summer, to petanque and Pimms. The Women's Euros and the Rugby World Cup have both played out here on the terrace screens, and the group markets the room as a Bankside base for the big weekends.
The drinks list is the real argument for coming. The Refinery mixes classic, seasonal and sharing cocktails, and the Sarti Spritz terrace leans hard into the warm-weather spritz crowd. Cocktails run around £12 to £14, wines by the glass start near £8, and the kitchen sends out small plates and sharing boards rather than the wings-and-nachos sports-bar canon. Order a spritz on the terrace before kickoff; skip the room downstairs if you want to actually watch the match.
Who it is for is the after-work Bankside crowd that wants a final on a screen without surrendering the evening to a packed front bar. Office groups from the surrounding Southwark blocks, gallery-goers spilling out of Tate Modern, and couples who want sport at arm's length all suit it. For a louder, screens-first night, our roundup of the best sports bars in London points to harder-edged rooms.
Best time to go is a summer weekend afternoon when the terrace is open and a marquee fixture is on. A Friday after-work slot is the room at its busiest, more drinks crowd than sports crowd. Avoid a wet winter midweek, when the terrace shuts and the sport offer shrinks to whatever is on the indoor screens.
The room reads upmarket-casual rather than themed: exposed brick, a long marble-topped bar, and big windows that pull in the Southwark Street light. There is no cask line worth chasing here, which is the honest mark against it for a traditionalist; the beer offer is keg lager and craft cans rather than a hand-pull worth a detour. What it does well is volume on a busy terrace and a cocktail list that holds up against anything in the postcode.
Sightlines depend entirely on the weather. On a dry weekend the terrace screens carry the fixture to a full, sunlit crowd, and that is the version of The Refinery worth booking. Indoors, the sport is incidental, so a group set on watching should arrive early and ask for terrace seating outright. Booking ahead for a final is sensible, because Bankside fills from every direction on a warm Saturday.
The Refinery is a polished all-day bar that moonlights as a Bankside sports base when the calendar demands it. It will not satisfy a supporter who wants twenty screens and a four-metre wall, but for a spritz, a sharing board and a final in the sun it is one of the better terraces south of the river. For a wider tour of the capital, start with our London bar guide.
Sources: Drake and Morgan official page; Visit Bankside listing; DesignMyNight (110 Southwark Street).
