What to do instead of going to a bar?

All ahoy! It's a Thursday evening. A friend is in town. Let's show them something cool in London ... but wait! Neither of you want a banging head in the morning. One drink? Okay, but we don't want that to be headliner of the evening. We want something memorable, but can't keep flicking between a bar and a pub, a pub and a bar, as options.

If you're in this boat, here are a couple of destinations in London to jump off and enjoy that don't involve a bar.

Paint a pair of custom trainers at Art Play

📍Shoreditch and Chelsea 🎟️ From £60

Two locations, one rather excellent idea. Art Play runs a Custom Trainers Painting Workshop where you show up with a blank pair of kicks and leave with something genuinely one-of-a-kind. It's two and a half hours of focused, surprisingly meditative making, with all materials included. No experience needed, no artistic CV required. You'll be too busy deciding whether your left shoe needs a dragon on it to even think about last orders.

From £60, and worth every penny for the story alone. Especially as one cocktails is £13+ these and this way you go home with something you LOVE! Book here >>

If you don't fancy a pair of trainers but want to paint you could also try painting pottery or a canvas to add a splash of colour into your lives.

• The sustainable option: Upcycling Pottery Painting🎟️ From £8

• The try-my-luck-as-an-artist option; FreeFlow Painting 🎟️ From £16

Catch a late film at the BFI Southbank

📍Waterloo 🎟️ From £14.50

There's something about the South Bank at night that just works. The river doing its thing, the lights of the city bouncing off the water, and the BFI sitting there like a gift. The British Film Institute regularly screens cult classics, director retrospectives, and films you genuinely cannot find anywhere else. Grab a programme, pick something neither of you has seen, and let it do the heavy lifting conversationally for the rest of the evening. There's a decent bar if you fancy that one drink, a good cafe, and the kind of crowd that's there for the same reason you are. A proper night out that happens to involve sitting down in the dark.

Book here >>

Wander Columbia Road on a flower market evening

📍Hoxton 🎟️ FREE

Technically the market itself is a Sunday morning affair, but the streets around Columbia Road and Bethnal Green have a life of their own on weekday evenings. Independent shops, small galleries, and brilliant little restaurants that haven't been written up in every magazine yet. It's the sort of walk where you keep saying "shall we just pop in here?" and an hour disappears. Low cost, high charm, and you'll probably find something odd and wonderful to take home.

Visit the Flower Market >>

Why London is actually brilliant without a drink in hand

Here's the thing about London that people forget when they're defaulting to the pub: the city was not built around the pub. The pub was built around the city. London has more to offer on a quiet Thursday evening than almost anywhere else on earth, and most of it is completely accessible, affordable, and genuinely memorable in a way that pint number four simply is not.

The instinct to head to a bar is understandable. It's familiar, it fills the silence, it gives you something to do with your hands. But familiarity and memorability are not the same thing. When your friend heads back to wherever they came from, they won't be recounting the particular lager they had in a generic Shoreditch pub. They'll be talking about the painting still drying in their bag, or the film that floored them, or the florist on the corner who was closing up and handed them a bunch of leftover dahlias for a quid.

The sober or mostly-sober evening is also worth defending on its own terms. You can actually hear each other. You remember the conversation. You don't spend Sunday feeling vaguely guilty about nothing in particular. There's a reason that so many people, across so many different walks of life, are quietly choosing experiences over drinks right now. It's not about being virtuous. It's about getting more out of an evening.

A note on the "but what do we do instead of drinking" anxiety

If you're someone who's used to the pub as a social scaffold, it can feel slightly odd at first to plan an evening without it. What do you do with your hands? What fills the gaps in conversation? The answer, it turns out, is almost everything. Making something together (see: Art Play) gives you a shared task and removes the pressure to perform socially for two and a half hours. Watching something together at the BFI gives you ninety minutes of mutual experience to unpack over coffee afterwards. Walking and wandering, as underrated as it sounds, is actually one of the oldest and most effective ways to have a proper conversation with someone, because you're not sitting across from each other and the movement keeps things loose.

London is, in that sense, the perfect city for this. It rewards wandering. It rewards curiosity. It rewards showing up without a plan and letting the evening find its shape.

So, what are you actually going to do?

Next time a friend is in town and the group chat fills up with "bar?" messages, have something ready. A booking at Art Play, a BFI listing saved in your phone, a neighbourhood you've been meaning to explore. The city is right there, full of things to do that you'll still be talking about next week.

One drink is fine. Making it the whole evening is optional.