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[title]When it comes to the Bermondsey Beer Mile, there are a few things people can agree on. One, it’s a collection of bars in the railway arches down from London Bridge station towards Millwall’s New Den stadium. Two, it showcases some of the best independently made beer available in London. Three, there are a lot of people there on a Saturday afternoon.
Beyond that, definitions get hazy. There’s about 20 bars, it’s roughly two miles long and venues range from a craft beer taproom serving only pints to proper sit-down restaurants. The original reason for the beer mile’s existence was, of course, brewing beer, with brewers jamming a bar and a few taps between vessels to sell their wares direct to drinkers. In the early 2010s, brewers were drawn to the area in abundance because the Bermondsey arches were one of the few central spots in London where the rent on industrial units was cheap.
Times are changing, though. The average customer now looks very different: no longer somewhere reserved for in-the-know craft beer geeks, sinking a pint at each consecutive tap room has turned into a popular stag do activity, leading to complaints from disgruntled locals and damning newspaper headlines chronicling the bad behaviour of the many day drinkers. In 2025, only a small minority of stops on the mile still brew on-site, as ever-increasing demands on square footage has caused brewing equipment to be relocated, turning the beer mile into predominantly a bar space. And, following the most difficult period of trading since craft beer became a thing, this trend has accelerated, with four breweries on the mile shutting up shop in the last 18 months. So what does the future hold for London’s now-iconic drinking destination?
Paul Anspach, co-founder of Anspach & Hobday, one of the original brewers on the beer mile, can’t believe how far the area has come since they opened in 2013. ‘There’s no way you would open [on the beer mile] nowadays in the way that a lot of us did,’ he says. Anspach started with a tiny 200 litre brew kit, when most commercial brew kits start on at least 800 litres – so, in other words, it wasn’t the most efficient way to run a business. ‘I just don’t believe you could do it that way anymore,’ he says. ‘I think it comes back to needing to mature with the market and people becoming less experimental.’
As Anspach & Hobday grew, they had to build a larger brewery, which took away from the retail space. ‘But then the retail space became increasingly essential because it needed to shoulder a lot of the rent burden,’ Anspach says. ‘So you basically have two sides of the business that are throttling each other.’ Eventually, they moved their brewing equipment out to Croydon in 2019 and now continue to operate their old brew space on the mile as a bar. ‘What started out as a cheap, simple, light industrial space in the arches changed into somewhere where it’s just not feasible to be running a wholesale business because the price, the square footage price, is just too high,’ he says.
Andrew Catherall, founder of Three Hills brewing, only opened their space The Outpost on the beer mile in 2020 but quickly found the same pressures. ‘[Because of] the challenges that London poses in terms of the rent, cost per square metre, the pests, getting deliveries… we quickly found out that it wasn’t very easy or financially viable to actually brew [on the mile],’ he says. Three Hills has since moved its brewing equipment back to its original home in Thrapston, Northamptonshire.
Moving brewing operations away has worked out for Anspach & Hobday and Three Hills, but in the last 18 months, beer mile stalwarts Fourpure, Partizan and Brew By Numbers, all of whom started out brewing beer in Bermondsey, have changed hands or closed down. Hawkes Cider (owned by Brewdog), Spartan and EeBria have also left the area.
The beer mile isn’t shuttering, though, it’s just changing shape. Newcomers include It Ain’t Much If It Ain’t Dutch, a bar with more than 30 taps of Dutch beer, Enid Street Tavern, Mash Paddle Brewery (who offer brewing lessons on small kits), Kanpai Sake (who indeed brew their sake on the mile), a taproom for Battersea Brewery, and Fabal, a lager taproom operated by long-term mile residents Hiver. The deviation of these bars from generic London pub offerings suggests that new openings focusing on niches in the bar scene can actually do well – just look at Craft Beer Junction’s focus on brews from Tampa, Florida, and the lasting success of Gosnell’s, a mead brewery.
I can’t keep a business afloat on five people that are really geeky
There’s little sign of the mile’s popularity waning, even as the focus becomes less on beer brewed on-site. Over the past ten years, it’s become a bar crawl venue that people travel from all over to attend. I’ve been to beer festivals across Europe where beer geeks who’ve never visited the UK say they want to go to the Bermondsey Beer Mile. Not all visitors are there for the vegan-friendly barrel-aged smoked-rye ales, though. On a Saturday you’ll find a lot of large groups, often in costume or wearing matching T-shirts, who are just there for some heavy day drinking. Alice Hayward, the general manager of Cloudwater’s Enid Street taproom, tells me ‘people had a problem with it being called the beer mile in the first place, because that already suggests it’s a bar crawl, which we don’t really want it to be.’
The crowds on the Saturdays are not quite the genteel beer geeks that attend the other days of the week, but they are also vital to keeping these bars going. ‘A Saturday is 50 percent of our weekly revenue. No one cares about what liquid they’re consuming as long as it’s alcoholic, but that’s keeping your business afloat,’ says Hayward. ‘I can’t keep a business afloat on five people that are really geeky. Saturdays have just become a chaos of, ‘‘can I have 10 lagers? Can I have a JD & coke?’’ And we don’t have that so they’re like, ‘‘what, aren’t you a bar?’’’
Mauritz Borg, GM of The Kernel’s new taproom on the mile, agrees. ‘It’s a lot of bars and people getting in on the action,’ he says. ‘It’s already lost, I would say, that special ‘‘beer specific’’ thing. Now everyone serves everything.’
A quick Google will throw up many complaints of antisocial behaviour on the beer mile. One particularly dramatic headline from The Sun reads ‘Our neighbourhood is just like Ibiza – we’re too scared to leave our homes in the morning as it’s full of rowdy drunks’. Another in MyLondon writes: ‘Brain tumour survivor ‘‘living in hell’’ as Bermondsey Beer Mile drinkers barge into homes, abuse residents and wee in streets’. From my own experience, people approaching the end of the stretch of bars can often fuse with a Millwall FC crowd, creating one of London’s ultimate chaotic experiences.
When I speak to bars about the issues, owners tell me they have been trying their best to deal without a huge amount of constructive engagement from Southwark Council or the police. The arches look directly onto several housing estates, and residents have complained of drinkers urinating in their bin cupboards, entering their flats and smashed glass. Even requests to put in more bins on the streets to save on the inevitable litter have, apparently, gone unheeded.
Across the mile, you’ll see art classes and pottery workshops as spaces seek to diversify
But more positive changes have been brewing, too. Three Hills, along with fellow beer mile tenant Moor, has converted part of their formerly beer-dedicated spaces into new music venues, putting on paid and free concerts every single week, as the competition to draw people into spaces and keep them there intensifies. Three Hills’ offering spans pretty much everything from acoustic singer-songwriters to metal, while Moor has focused in particular on hardcore, metal, and dance music. These new stages are superb local additions to an area relatively starved of gig venues as compared to destinations like Brixton or Hackney. Across the mile, you’ll even see art classes and pottery workshops as spaces seek to diversify.
While Bermondsey continues to change from its craft brew beginnings, alternative ‘beer miles’ in London have started to gain traction. The Blackhorse Beer Mile in Walthamstow houses up to eight breweries, most of which are on more traditional industrial estates and thus have the space to brew in the same building they serve the beer, much like the beginnings of Bermondsey.
So, the Bermondsey Beer Mile: it’s not really a mile, it’s longer, and it’s not really just about beer anymore. But while the spaces themselves have shifted from housing small hobbyist brew kits to a slick sake bar, the independent spirit largely remains – which, given the lack of centralised beer mile organisation to ward off bigger brands, might come as a surprise. You only have to go down to London Bridge’s new refurbed arches and you’ve got some well-known companies operating out of there. ‘It’s not that the spaces are inherently prohibitive for bigger operations,’ says Anspach. ‘[The Beer Mile] does seem to have a sort of self-sustaining independent ethos, which is weird. I think that’s what makes it unique in London, really.’
Check out our list of the best breweries and taprooms in London.