Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 20/06/2026 18:27:00

Housed in a former Victorian railway station beside Hackney Central, Oslo is a double-decker bar, restaurant and live-music venue that opened in 2014 inside the roughly 140-year-old building. Drawing on a Nordic aesthetic in its name and styling, it serves food and drink by day and turns into a gig venue and late-night club after dark. The ground floor combines a bar and a restaurant with a Scandinavian theme, offering burgers, small plates and smorgasbords alongside a well-regarded range of draught and bottled beers, including brews from local breweries, plus a decent wine list. In recent years its kitchen has leaned into Italian-American-style pizza, and the bar runs daily cocktail deals. Upstairs sits the venue's main draw: a live-music room with a capacity of around 375 and a sound system praised as among the best for a medium-sized space. The room has hosted a long list of artists, from rising indie bands to acts who could fill far larger venues, and it stages gigs and club nights across genres including indie, rock, pop and electronic. The downstairs bar doubles as a club space for late nights and DJ-led events, and a "secret" karaoke den runs on Fridays, adding to the venue's mix. The whole building is available for hire for gigs, club nights, private parties, product launches and film shoots, helped by its double-height spaces and flexible layout. Set right next to Hackney Central station, Oslo is both a daytime meeting spot and a night-time destination, with a reputation as a venue where coming for a drink is as appealing as coming for a show. Its conversion of a historic station into a music-led bar has made it a fixture of east London's scene. The conversion of the disused Hackney Central station, a roughly 140-year-old structure, was an early example of the area's wave of railway-arch and heritage reuse, and the building's industrial bones still shape its double-height spaces. Praised by many touring musicians for its sound, the upstairs room has hosted names who went on to far bigger stages, helping cement Oslo's reputation as one of east London's key mid-sized music venues.