The Light Bar and Mezzanine Bar,
Outernet London

The venue

Outernet opened in 2022 on the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Charing Cross Road, and drew more than six million visitors in its first year. HERE is its main room, the largest venue to open in central London since the 1940s, with mezzanines on three sides and the Elizabeth Line running beneath it.

It sits beside Denmark Street, London’s old Tin Pan Alley, where David Bowie, Elton John and the Rolling Stones all made music. Archer Humphryes designed the space, and we designed and installed seven bars across Outernet.

Designed for the rush

A gig crowd doesn’t drink steadily. It arrives all at once when the doors open, and again in the gap before the headliner, and that is when a bar is judged. Outernet wanted their bars to be far larger than the venue capacity needed, so the queue cleared between sets rather than eating into the show.

Spreading service across four bars did much of that work. The Light Bar faces the stage, the Liquor Bar sits in a corner of the ground floor, the Mezzanine Bar is in the corner of the level above it, and a VIP bar has a boldly tiled room of its own.

The Light Bar

Facing the stage, the Light Bar is the one the architects called the showstopper, and the bar that takes the bulk of the crowd. Four double stations and one single station put nine bartenders side by side along more than fifteen metres of underbar. Each station is self contained, with its own sink, pitcher rinser, till and preparation space, so there was no crossover between bar staff, and large shared ice wells meant no one had to stop serving to refill the ice.

We designed in low level box beer fonts in favour of standard bartop mounted beer fonts, so guests could see who is free to serve them and bartenders can see who is next.

The Mezzanine Bar

The Mezzanine Bar sits in the corner of the upper level, directly above the Liquor Bar on the ground floor, and serves the mezzanines that wrap around the room. Built in the same package and to the same standard, it gave the upper level a bar of its own, with cocktail stations, ice wells and can storage, so the crowd upstairs never adds to the queue below.