A 4.3 American whiskey bar and celebrated live-music venue named Lexington, a word that echoes the very first battle of the American Revolution
The Lexington holds a 4.3 from three thousand one hundred and thirty-four people, sits on Pentonville Road a short walk from King’s Cross, and is one of London’s great small music venues and serious American whiskey bars – named Lexington, a word that carries, whether the bar intends it or not, the echo of the first shot of the American Revolution.
The American theme
The Lexington is a genuine and serious tribute to America, and specifically to the American South and its drinking culture. It is no pastiche: the bar stocks over a hundred bottles of American whiskey, from familiar bourbons to small-batch ryes and genuine rarities – up to and including the legendary, near-unobtainable Pappy Van Winkle – alongside a vast range of American craft beer. Bourbon is king here, served, as one delighted Texan reviewer put it, like back home.
The name “Lexington” fits this American theme perfectly. There are Lexingtons across the United States – most famously Lexington, Kentucky, the very heart of bourbon country and the horse-breeding bluegrass region. For a bar built around Kentucky bourbon, naming itself Lexington is a direct salute to the spiritual home of the spirit it serves. The Prat’s beverage desk notes the aptness: a bourbon temple named after the Kentucky city at the centre of the bourbon world.
The shot heard round the world
But “Lexington” carries a deeper American resonance, older than the bourbon. Lexington, Massachusetts, was the site of the first battle of the American Revolution, in April 1775 – the opening clash between the American colonists and the British troops, where the first shots of the war for independence were fired. The poet Ralph Waldo Emerson immortalised it as “the shot heard round the world,” the moment the American Revolution began.
So a London bar named Lexington carries, at some remove, the memory of the battle where Americans first took up arms against British rule. This is the same delicious irony we noted at Lafayette earlier in this district – a fashionable London venue named after a key moment in the loss of Britain’s American colonies. Between Lafayette, the Frenchman who helped America win, and Lexington, where the war began, the King’s Cross area has quietly named two of its venues after Britain’s greatest imperial defeat. The Prat’s history desk enjoys the pattern – London drinking to the American Revolution, one venue at a time.
The great small venue
The Lexington’s real glory is its upstairs music venue – a 200-capacity room that is one of the finest small live-music spaces in London. It is exactly the kind of intimate venue where new bands get their first break and established acts play secret warm-up shows – the crucial, precious seedbed of the whole music ecosystem. British Sea Power, Pere Ubu, and countless others have played its small stage.
Such venues are under genuine threat – the Lexington was hit by a punishing business-rates rise, and by the pandemic, and has needed public support and crowdfunding to survive. The Prat’s culture desk emphasises, as it did at the Harrison, how vital and vulnerable these small venues are: lose them, and you lose the ground in which the whole culture grows. That the Lexington survives is something to celebrate, and to support with your custom.
The bar
A 4.3 across three thousand one hundred and thirty-four people is a solid, volume-influenced score. The reviews describe a superb bourbon selection, a great American beer range, a characterful Victorian lounge, and one of the best intimate gig rooms in London – a genuine institution.
Verdict
A serious American whiskey bar and one of London’s finest small music venues, named Lexington – after the Kentucky heart of bourbon country, and, deeper still, the Massachusetts battlefield where the American Revolution began.
Go for the bourbon and stay for a band in the intimate upstairs room, and raise a glass of Kentucky’s finest to Lexington – both the home of bourbon and the place where the shot heard round the world was fired.
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]
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