Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 19/06/2026 20:29:00

Upper Street is Islington's long spine of bars, restaurants, and theatres running north from Angel, and this stretch of north London is where Be At One placed one of its cocktail bars. Part of a chain that operated a particularly strong cluster of sites across central London, the Islington bar follows the group's drink-led model, trading on cocktails and a party mood rather than a dining menu. The business was started in May 1998 by Steve Locke, Leigh Miller, and Rhys Oldfield, three bartenders who had worked together at TGI Fridays before opening their first bar on Battersea Rise. Their aim was to build a cocktail bar where the drinks and the service mattered more than the decor, an approach they described as cocktail theatre, and the menu eventually expanded to around 101 cocktails. Over the next twenty years Be At One grew into a chain of more than thirty bars in prime high-street locations, the majority of them concentrated in central London. In July 2018 the group was bought by the Stonegate Pub Company in a transaction reported at about 50 million pounds, with the founders stepping away while the bars continued under the same branding and concept. The Islington venue delivers the standard Be At One experience: an extensive cocktail list mixed by trained bartenders, regular happy hours and offers, and resident DJs who raise the tempo through the evening. Its place on Upper Street, amid one of the capital's densest concentrations of places to eat and drink, makes it well suited to after-work meet-ups, pre-show drinks, and weekend nights out. Be At One built a reputation on its bartender culture, training staff to mix a long classic-and-contemporary menu at pace and running internal cocktail competitions, in step with the wider rise of British cocktail bars through the 2000s and 2010s. Across the group the pattern is similar - two-for-one and happy-hour deals earlier in the week giving way to DJ-led party nights at the weekend - with the size of the list a selling point in itself. Upper Street and the surrounding Angel area form one of north London's densest concentrations of bars, restaurants, and theatres, including the Almeida and nearby Sadler's Wells, giving the Islington bar a ready audience for pre-show drinks, after-work gatherings, and weekend nights out.