The square, and what sits under it
Hoxton Square is one of the older squares in London, laid out in the late seventeenth century, and it has spent most of the time since being somewhere other people did not go. Then the galleries arrived in the nineties, the bars followed the galleries, and most of the galleries moved on. What is left is a patch of grass under plane trees, four sides of low brick buildings, and a surprising amount of drinking done one floor below the street.
That is the useful fact for anybody meeting someone for the first time. At nine on a Thursday the grass and the pavement tables are loud and crowded, and most people are standing. Go down one flight of steps and the room changes: seats, table service, low light, and very often a door that stops letting people in when the room is full rather than packing them onto the stairs.
Why a basement suits a first drink
Three reasons, all of them practical. There is no traffic and no passing crowd, so nobody is talking over a bus. Seats are the rule rather than the exception, which means you sit facing each other instead of standing sideways at a shelf. And the better basements cap their numbers, so the room at ten is not very different from the room at eight.
The fourth reason is less practical and matters more. A first drink is mostly about hearing someone properly: how they tell a story, what they find funny, when they go quiet. A room below ground, with brick overhead and nobody looking in through a window, makes that easier than any terrace in Hoxton or Shoreditch does on a busy night.
Judging one from the top of the stairs
Stop on the top step and listen. If the music is clear from the pavement, it will be too loud at the table, and you should keep walking. If what you hear is glasses and voices and not much else, go down. Once inside, look for somewhere to sit that is not the bar: a booth, a corner table, anything with a wall behind it.
Be wary of anywhere with a DJ setting up before ten, because the volume only goes one way from there. Skip rooms where the only seats are high stools along a counter, which make a conversation feel like a queue. And if the person on the door says a table will be free in twenty minutes, believe the twenty minutes on a Tuesday and double it on a Friday.
One basement worth knowing by name
Happiness Forgets, on the square itself, is the bar most people mean when they talk about drinking below Hoxton. It is small, low ceilinged and serious about its cocktails without being solemn about them, and it has held a reputation among bartenders for years. It fills early on Thursdays and Fridays, so arrive at the start of the evening or be ready to walk. Other basements on and just off the square come and go with their leases, and the desk keeps a current view rather than a printed list.
Ask Nell which room she would choose for a particular night and she will tell you, and she will say plainly if the answer is none of them. There are evenings when the whole square is too busy for a first drink, and the better move is to walk five minutes up Kingsland Road and start with dinner instead.
Nine on a Thursday, timed
Book from a quarter to nine. She gets to the bar before you, or at the same minute, and is already sitting down when you come down the stairs, and the booked time starts when she sits. The first drink takes forty minutes and the second rather longer. At around half past ten the room begins to fill with people who have eaten, and that is the natural moment to go back up to the street.
From there the choices are easy. A late plate on Kingsland Road, the walk south to Shoreditch High Street, or a second basement if the first was right. A late night booking is built for exactly this shape, and the figure at one in the morning is the figure at nine. If the evening wants to carry on up into Dalston, the Overground runs through the night at weekends.
Who to meet at the bottom of the stairs
Milena works the Kingsland Road strip, is the tallest person in most rooms on it and has never once looked bothered by that. Angelika has no patience for a slow room, which makes her very good at spotting the right one from the door. Karolina comes over from Bethnal Green, tall and direct, and has long since finished deciding what she likes, which usually includes the corner table.
All three are on the raven haired shortlist, the six women on this site with properly black hair. All three also appear among the statuesque, which under a low basement ceiling is worth knowing before you arrive. The rest of the board works on the same terms.
The lengths that fit
An hour at £250 is enough for a first drink and a clear idea of whether you want a second. Ninety minutes at £400 is the comfortable version. Three hours at £700 turns the drink into an evening with food in it and a walk at the end. None of those figures moves after midnight or on a Saturday.
The fee is handed to her in person once she has arrived and sat down, and the rates page carries the whole ladder if you want it in front of you before you write.
Filed under: most of the names in this note also sit on the raven haired list in the shortlists.