The Doodle Bar

A Bermondsey bar A Bermondsey bar where the writing is literally on the walls.

When Doodle Bar first opened in Battersea in 2009, it was a spot to cherish. Hidden in an industrial warehouse through a carpark, it was a pop-up when pop-ups weren’t de rigueur. And the drinks were properly cheap. Best of all, you could write on the walls, along the tables and even on the waiters’ whites. As time went on, the pop-up went perm, the prices went up and the doodling was limited to the walls, but it remained a gem. That was until it closed to make way for luxury flats (that old chestnut!) in 2015. But now Doodle Bar is back, occupying a railway arch in Bermondsey. Three cheers for that.

Open Thursday to Sunday, the weekend feels like it starts here while the other arches are shutting up shop. The concrete floor is high gloss, there’s a foosball table at the front of the bar and a street food van parks up at the entrance on weekends – Constancia on our trip, with its awesome Argentinian steak sandwiches. But the real action is at the back; a narrow arch of a room, with blackboards on both sides and ping pong tables down the middle.

The main reason for coming down, apart from the cheap drinks and the ping pong tables, is that you are literally invited to doodle over anything! Big blackboards rapidly fill up with with characters, flowers and animals. It's great fun and the calm and relaxed atmosphere is perfect to chill out with a real homely feeling.

A short list of decent cocktails is joined by a well curated wine list and the bar’s own pale ale. It obviously helped; by the end of the night the walls were covered in, er, ‘imaginative’ sketches. Doodle Bar has still got it.