London has more rooftop bars than any city in Europe, and a fair number of them are not worth the lift ride. The view is the product, so the drinks are often an afterthought: a £16 cocktail, three lagers on tap, and a queue.
We run brewery tours across London, so we spend a lot of time thinking about what is actually in the glass. This guide is the list we give people who ask — organised by area, honest about which ones are free, which need booking weeks ahead, and which close the moment the weather turns.
The short version
If you only want three names:
- Sky Garden if you want the view and want it free.
- Frank's Cafe in Peckham if you want the London people actually go to.
- Seabird in Southwark if you want the view and the drinks to be good.
Free rooftop bars in London
Most rooftops charge nothing to enter — you simply have to buy a drink. A handful are genuinely free to walk into, which matters if you're showing someone the city on a budget.
Sky Garden, on floors 35 to 37 of the Walkie-Talkie at 20 Fenchurch Street, is the big one. Entry is free but you must book, and the free tickets are released every Monday on the Sky Garden website. They go quickly. If you miss them you can still get in by booking a table at one of the restaurants inside — Darwin Brasserie is the most reliable.
Frank's Cafe in Peckham sits on the top deck of the multi-storey car park on Rye Lane and has run every summer since 2009. No entry charge, no bookings — first come, first served. The 2026 season runs 15 May to 12 September, Wednesday to Sunday. It is concrete, plastic chairs and a Campari-red canopy, and it has a better view than places charging £20 a head.
Queen Elizabeth Hall Roof Garden at the Southbank Centre is a wildflower meadow five floors above the Thames, free to wander, with a bar in the middle of it. It reopened for the 2026 season on 1 April. Seasonal, so check before you walk over.
Netil360 in Hackney, on top of Netil House, is the East London equivalent — scruffier, cheaper, and full of people who work in the building.
Central London rooftop bars
| Bar | Where | Floor | Open |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sky Garden / Sky Pod | 20 Fenchurch Street, City | 35–37 | Year-round, book ahead |
| Aqua Spirit | Regent Street, Soho | Rooftop | Year-round, walk-in |
| Soho Sky Terrace | Courthouse Hotel, Soho | 6 | Year-round |
| 1 Leicester Square Rooftop | Leicester Square | 9 | Year-round |
| 8 at The Londoner | Leicester Square | 8 | Year-round |
| The Rooftop St. James | Trafalgar Square | 7 | Year-round |
| Kitty Hawk | Page8 Hotel, Trafalgar Square | 6 | Year-round |
| Radio Rooftop | ME London, Covent Garden | Rooftop | Year-round |
| The AMANO Rooftop | Hotel AMANO, Covent Garden | 7 | Year-round |
| Alto by San Carlo | Selfridges, Oxford Street | 6 | Year-round, retractable roof |
| 1864 Rooftop | John Lewis, Oxford Circus | 6 | Year-round |
| La'Yam Rooftop | Kingsbourne House, Holborn | 8 | Year-round |
Aqua Spirit above Regent Street is the one to know if you don't plan ahead — the terraces above Aqua Kyoto and Aqua Nueva work on a first-come basis, so you can turn up.
Alto by San Carlo on the Selfridges roof has a retractable roof, which in London is not a gimmick. It means the booking you made three weeks ago still happens in October.
The AMANO Rooftop in Covent Garden looks straight at the London Eye and Big Ben, which is the postcard shot most visitors are actually after.
City of London and east
The City rooftops go higher than anywhere else, because the buildings do.
Sushisamba on floors 38 and 39 of the Heron Tower has the highest outdoor dining terraces in Europe and a 360-degree view to match. It is expensive and it knows it.
Wagtail sits on a 1920s building in the City with a ninth-floor restaurant and a tenth-floor terrace, ringed by Tower Bridge, St Paul's, the Shard, the Gherkin and the Walkie-Talkie. Few rooftops give you that many landmarks at once.
Savage Garden at the DoubleTree by Hilton on Tower Hill is the best-value 360-degree view in the City — twelve floors up, and it does not cost what the Heron Tower costs.
Jin Bo Law at the Dorsett City in Aldgate, fourteen floors up, is the same idea slightly further east.
Boundary Rooftop in Shoreditch is a long-running favourite and still one of the better places to look back at the City skyline rather than stand inside it. KASO at One Hundred Shoreditch and Upper 5th at the Courthouse Shoreditch cover the same patch.
Queen of Hoxton rebuilds its rooftop around a different theme every year — worth checking what it is before you commit.
PocketSquare at the Hyatt Place in Whitechapel is the underrated one: nine floors, the Gherkin one way and Canary Wharf the other, and rarely a queue.
If you're out this way, the Hackney Wick Craft Beer Experience covers the breweries under those same rooftops.
South of the river
South London is where the rooftops get interesting, largely because they were not designed by hotel groups.
Seabird on the 14th floor of The Hoxton Southwark has London's longest oyster list and a view down over south London with the trains threading in and out of Waterloo. Bar Arriba in the same building does Mexican small plates with resident DJs. Both are year-round.
12th Knot at Sea Containers looks straight along the Thames. OXO Tower Bar, eight floors up at Oxo Tower Wharf, has been doing the same view for thirty years and still gets it right.
London Bridge Rooftop on Colechurch House gives you a full 360 — Shard, London Eye, Tower of London — with burgers and DJs rather than tasting menus. We've written a separate guide to the rooftop bars around London Bridge, because there are more of them than people expect.
Forza Wine on the fifth floor of Market Peckham is the best wine list on any London roof, and Bussey Rooftop Bar at the Bussey Building nearby runs year-round with a rooftop cinema in summer.
Midnight Apothecary at the Brunel Museum in Rotherhithe is a rooftop garden over the Thames Tunnel shaft with cocktails made from what's growing in it. Spring and summer only, and it books out.
Pergola Brixton and the Birds Nest at International House cover Brixton; Joia at the Art'Otel in Battersea has a pool.
Rooftop bars that take beer seriously
This is where most rooftop guides stop being useful. A view does not make a beer list, and a lot of these terraces pour whatever the contract gives them.
The ones worth going to for the drink as well as the height:
- Frank's Cafe, Peckham — a genuinely good short list of cans from London breweries, sold at Peckham prices rather than skyline prices.
- Netil360, Hackney — East London taps, and close enough to the Hackney breweries to be pouring the good stuff.
- Bussey Rooftop Bar, Peckham — proper independent selection, year-round.
- Seabird, Southwark — the wine and cocktails are the point, but the beer list is chosen rather than inherited.
- Queen Elizabeth Hall Roof Garden — the Southbank Centre bars stock small London brewers more often than not.
The pattern holds: the independent rooftops on car parks and arts venues pour better beer than the hotel rooftops charging twice as much. If the beer matters more than the altitude, a London brewery tour or the best beer gardens in London will serve you better than any of these.
Practical notes
Booking. Assume you need it between May and September, and assume Thursday to Saturday is gone a fortnight ahead. Sky Garden's free tickets drop on Mondays. Frank's and Aqua Spirit don't take bookings at all, which is either a relief or a problem depending on the day.
Weather. London rooftops mostly have a wet-weather plan — covered sections, heaters, retractable roofs — but "mostly" is doing work in that sentence. Seasonal venues like Frank's, the QEH Roof Garden and Roof East simply close.
Cost. Expect £14–£18 for a cocktail on a hotel rooftop in zone 1, £7–£9 for a beer. South of the river and on the car-park rooftops it drops by a third. Some venues run a minimum spend on Friday and Saturday evenings — check before you book, not after.
Dress code. Rare, but the Shard venues and a few hotel rooftops enforce one. Trainers are usually fine; sportswear usually is not.
Where to go next
If you'd rather taste than sightsee, our London brewery tours run through Bermondsey and Hackney Wick — the arches under half these skylines. And if you're buying for someone else, a gift voucher works on any tour we run.
For eating rather than drinking, see our guide to rooftop restaurants in London.