Bar Vinyl

They talk of The Hawley Arms, the Dublin Castle and The Lock Tavern as Camden’s nightlife influencing triptych but there’s never any love for Bar Vinyl. Why we ask? Why does this small bar on Inverness Street not deserve a place in the annals of Camden history?

Having been around for the past decade and more, Bar Vinyl has outlasted a lot of bars on this small strip of Camden-specific venues. Still stuck in a time when it was okay to serve Becks Vier as your luxury pint on tap, when stone baked pizzas were king and Long Island Iced Tea was the cocktail du jour, it won’t change for anybody. Given the length of time it has been attracting fresh new Londoners into its interior – for surely new transplants are the only ones visiting anew? – its inability to upgrade itself is perhaps the key. Not everybody wants ‘new’ and not everybody minds smelly beer and cheap cocktails when all they’re looking for is a bar that plays a solid night of music every day of the week. So, good for Bar Vinyl. The music is generally good, although some (we) say it’s not what it was in its 2003 heyday, the pizzas are still good value and once you’ve learned to steer clear of that beer you’ll find that the Long Island Iced Tea is still the sweet delicious thing it was in the days when you knew no better.

So what we say to all the tastemakers is this; get Bar Vinyl on your list of Camden institutions of great social and historical importance and then head down for a trip back to 2003, when EVERYTHING was great.