Seven elevated venues across four postcodes, and the number will not move, and it has nothing to do with the bars
Savage Garden holds a 4.1 from sixteen hundred and eighty-three people.
Of course it does.
The complete table
Seven elevated venues. Four postcodes. Four hundred and thirty-eight articles.
The Gods Rooftop Bar, Covent Garden: 3.8.
Skylon, on the Royal Festival Hall: 4.1.
Miradora, a rooftop tequileria: 4.1.
The Queen Elizabeth Hall Roof Garden, with a wildflower meadow on Brutalist concrete: 4.1.
AMANO Rooftop, Covent Garden: 4.1.
The Terrace: 4.5 – the outlier, and the most sheltered of them.
Madison, on the roof of One New Change: 4.5 – the second outlier, and it has the best view in London, which is enough to beat the weather.
And Savage Garden: 4.1.
The finding, stated finally
Seven venues. Seven operators. Completely different concepts, prices, crowds, food and staff.
Five of the seven have landed at 4.1 or below – clustered within a tenth of each other, well below the district average in every case.
The two that escaped did so by having walls, or by having a view so extraordinary that it overrides everything else.
The Institute for Elevated Hospitality in Thamesmead has now completed its work across four postcodes and can state the finding without hedging: in London, altitude costs a venue between 0.3 and 0.5 stars, permanently, and the only defences are shelter and spectacle.
Not quality. Not price. Not staff. Not the view – which is praised, in glowing terms, in the very same reviews that then mark the place down.
Why we keep going
Because a rooftop bar in this country is not selling a bar. It is selling a memory of somewhere else.
It is Barcelona. It is Rome. It is a terrace at eight in the evening with the heat still coming off the stone, and that is the picture in the head of every single person who books one.
And then they arrive, in the City, in April, with a wind coming off the river that was not in the photograph, and a blanket on the back of the chair, and a heater doing its best – and the gap between the promise and the pavement is exactly half a star.
There are perhaps forty evenings a year when it works. We plan our summers around them. It is a bad bet and everybody keeps making it, including us, every year, without fail.
Verdict
Check the forecast. That is the review.
What would fix it
Heat, and a great deal of it, and everybody knows it.
The rooftops that thrive in this city are the ones that abandoned the Mediterranean fantasy entirely and installed enough outdoor heating to be visible from space.
They are environmentally indefensible. They are full every night of the year. And there is a lesson in that which nobody in the industry wants to say out loud, so we will say it for them.
London does not want a terrace. London wants to be warm, and to be able to pretend it is outside.
Verdict
Check the forecast. That is the review.
This is the only category of venue in four postcodes where the weather app is more useful than the reviews.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
