The Offside Bar, Old Street, London

I agree with Urbanite this place is literally screaming out for a make over. To me it did not look like a pub or a bar just a worn out hall with a bar on the side and a few wooden tables and chairs with a couple of brown sofas. There is nothing to it. Personally I have no business there so I wont be caught in there again.

One thing I do remember is my collegue ordered a pint of Guinness which was 75% head no word of a lie.

The only thing working for the offside bar is its location!

Whilst listed as a Sports Bar, I think a more accurate description of The Offside Bar would be a run down drinking hole. Fine if you live locally and enjoy the company there, but not up to the standards I would have expected in London. Maybe during the day there is more evidence of the sports theme.

Having said that the bar staff were friendly, and I think it is just the case of a fading pub in a not particularly good location slowly going downhill. I wouldn’t recommend it for a night out with friends and the sports theme doesn’t appeal.

We held out “Qype Party” here.. was a good night but i thnk that was mostly because we was all pretty drunk after drinking a few bottles of wine and the crew that i was with was what made it a good night… other wise the venue was very worn down needed a well earned make-over!! The whole bar was green.. which for one isnt the most attractive colour.. the furniture was very worn out and the whole outlook of the place was very pleasing!! However they did have some awesome pictures hanging from the wall.

This place really didn’t blow my hair back and is begging for a makeover. A certain something to make it more attractive nad pull in the crowds that would otherwise be enticed by the layout and location.
Specific to our night it looked like a closing down sale with worryingly low levels of stock behind the counter and was horrified to be offered a diamond white cider as the only alternative to ciders/alchopops. The furniture is really worn down and the toilets were unfortunately below par. There are many better places around the corner and think they may need to pull up their socks in order to survive and thrive.

The venue for the Qype Party.

A large room, slightly worn out look, with fantastic pictures up and around. All of sports and some fabulous black woman.

I quite liked the worn out feel, it made me think of Ernest Hemingway for some reason, and I loved the pictures. It would be easy to think this was a dive, but the patina on the floorboards alone is beautiful and soft and tells a story. Nothing pretentious and nothing tatty. Just understated calmness and taste. Great sofas and chairs - leather and soft.

I met some wonderful Qypers with very quick brains. The food was laid on and was fab - so thanks Qype!

The loos - hmmm! Ran out of loo roll, one had no lock. It seemed no one went in during the evening to give it a wipe aound the sinks or check cleanliness. The flush also stopped working.

Saw the mens! Yes folks! I walked in there before the others arrived and thought 'uhhh!’. It seemed clean then. I really don’t want to know about later, thanks!

I was very grateful that there was a parking slot outside the back door. But it took ages to find! My Navman had a breakdown, and I nearly had a meltdown! So was very happy to arrive and sink into a leather chair with a cold coke!

It was the company that made it, met some great people! And non qypers! Ninja had a ball!

I’m a sports bar kinda man. Why? It combines two of my favourite hobbies; watching (not partaking in note) sport and partaking in (not watching note) the drink. Attending the qype birthday quiz last night required thinking as well as drinking, so I had to forgo the sport.

First impressions were good. The green exterior and neon sign gave the air a joint with a bit of money spent on it. However, I think the the neon sign must have tipped it over budget, as the interior was a bit of a let down - somehow it felt like an old school classroom. Maybe catching it on on a private party night doesn’t do it justice - but having three draught lines out before it had even kicked off was a bit poor .

Some nice leftfield thinking has gone into naming The Offside bar (did you see what I did there?!!) - its just a shame they haven’t spent a little more thought on content…

Let’s be honest here. This place isn’t 'a little tired’ it’s a complete hole. I might go back but only if it was in the top 10 remaining pubs in London, but other than that, no way jose.

The food was at best terrible, at worst it’s probably a case of food poisoning. And what kind of pub runs out of booze apart from Carling? I can’t remember the last time I saw a row of four 100% empty fridges behind the bar. It wasn’t as if there were thousands of people there either. Any half decent pub near a reasonably sized office would have 3 times as many people on a Friday night.

I’m not even going to write anything about the toilet facilities for fear of a spot of post traumatic stress disorder. Health wise I think I’m ok as I passed by the tropical diseases hospital for a check up on my way home.

So in summary, NIL Points. I’m glad I didn’t have my birthday there.

p.s. I can’t believe that I can’t award 0 stars. FAIL

As Urbanite said in the party forum, “the parties you have are made by the people you surround yourself by”. The offside bar could have been a hangar in Kandahar and we still would have had a blast!

The bar itself is spacious and primed for live sport. It’s a bit run down and quite far from the tube station, so this is not a venue i would ordinarily visit. Bar staff were really friendly though and accommodated our party with smiling faces! I was a bit disappointed that they ran out of Corona and Cider so quickly (i think it ran out before the quiz started!) Perhaps they didn’t anticipate hoards of thirsty Qypers ;)

All in all a good, solid pub and i will be coming back to watch the football if i’m ever in EC1 again!

I think sports bars are for people who like football. I don’t like football. I once tried very hard to like football because someone I like likes it. I watched two whole half games. One was very boring as it just involved people running backwards and forwards after a ball and not very much happening. Really rolling a ping pong ball around in a tray would have been as much fun. The other had lots of fouls and was much more interesting. I can’t help but think that if a game is more interesting when people cheat, maybe something is lacking from the game.

I have a strong suspicion that for most fans it’s more about the other fans than the game. It’s a group ritual. More specifically, it’s a generally a male ritual.

So there’s me, stopping off to top up my phone on the way to the Qype 1 year birthday party. So while I was there I asked if they knew the Offside Bar. Yes they did… ‘You mean the sports bar?’ in a tone that said very clearly that I did not look like the regular clientele. Having confirmed I was indeed going in the right direction I headed on. I bet they thought I was a kissogram or something.

Anyway, the bar… City Road is pretty bleak. The bar has bright green bits outside. Bright green has a tendency to remind me of the Tommy Knockers (as in Stephen King). Here it also has absolutely nothing, as far as I can see, to do with the Irish. Inside the bar is verging on bleak as well. If it was empty it would be a huge gaping space, with bar at one end and a raised area with comfy seating at the other. I have no idea how full it usually is, but for us it was ideal. That big space was full with lots of tables. Most folks got seated, which is good for a pub if you ask me.

I only actually visited the bar once. I had my doubts when they said they were out of cider… but the staff seemed nice, and did rustle up a can of Diamond White, which was nice. They also put on a massive spread of food. Quite varied too, with stuff for fry fans (e.g. onion rings), via posh (prawns on sticks), sandwiches (ham and pickle) to salad. I think some of it came out of packets, but if so they were good quality packets and very tasty. The ladies loos had seen better days, with one door being minus a lock and loo roll on the top of the cistern rather than in the holder. Clean though.

As to the famous photographs… Yep, very good. I’m not a massive sports photography fan, but some of the photos were interesting. I did have a bit of a laugh over some in the loos. They have mirrors with pictures superimposed. E.g. one with some footballer, sprawled seductively, with his ball resting between his legs. LOL

I’m not exactly qualified to award stars to a sports bar, but I have to try… To be honest coming back here on a normal day to watch football appeals about as much as eating gravel. But on our night the atmosphere was great, the staff was friendly, there was plenty of seating (yes, we ran out, but there was more proportionally than you’d get in many pubs I reckon), and the place has individuality thanks to the photography. So I’m giving it a 4…

Having been to the Qype 1st birthday quiz here I couldn’t really not write a review. It may be out of context for a general guide to the place as it was a 'private function’ but a review with the bar in that capacity could be useful to some.

It’s a little out of the way in the sense that it’s not close to lots of other stuff, but it’s on the City Road so it’s easy to get to. We walked to it from Liverpool Street station and it was only 20/25 minutes or so. It’s pretty close to Angel station too so you can save your feet!

My first impression was that it looked a little tired - maybe it needs a new lick of paint as it doesn’t look like much has been done in the couple of years since it opened. Also, the captions underneath the pictures on the walls just look cheap (they’re little stuck on bits of paper), and for somewhere that is showcasing their work you’d maybe expect a little more glitz! Having said that, it’s all very functional and spacious so they’re only minor niggles.

On the plus side the food they provided (at Qype’s expense, thank you Qype!) was great. There was a wide selection of foods in the buffet with something for everyone, ranging from curly fries to a nice pasta. All of which were replenished when the throng had decimated them.

The bar staff were all very friendly, and coped admirably with such a ramshackle bunch that had descended upon them.

As it was a quiz night our minds were focused, but the atmosphere in the place was very good, and I imagine it’s no different on a normal day, a great place to watch an event I should imagine. It also strikes me that there would be a certain sense of peace among the punters, even if they were rival supporters and such like, just a friendly place to have a pint and watch the game. As alexd alludes to, this is no wannabe American sports bar. It’s a fairly decent little pub that happens to concentrate on sport.

The only other gripe I had was that they ran out of a lot of drinks - I’m not convinced that it was because of sheer weight of numbers, sure there were a lot of us there (and it was a free bar, thank you again Qype!), they just seemed a little understocked that night. Oh, and they didn’t manage to get their PA system working without feedback that made our ears bleed so the poor quizmaster had to shout his questions all evening!

It probably appears I’m slating the Offside Bar. I’m not, far from it. I’m offering up a review based on my experience that night. It was only one night, and an exception to how the bar is normally presented to the public, and I can certainly think of a lot worse places to be. I had an absolutely fantastic night there, and all of the things I have mentioned as negatives weren’t enough to make the experience unenjoyable. It unfortunately gets three stars from me because of those niggles but don’t let it put you off.

There is usually something about venues that are special. A stroke of panache, unique features or amazing staff. It is that combination of these winning factors that provide that 5-star rating on Qype.

The offside bar, I felt, offered nothing. OK, so the agency tie-up meant there is a few quite nice photos on the walls. I would be the first person to say I love pictures that show a thousand words, but missing out explaniations can leave things a little lacklustre. The other decor is just poor, giving that run-down pub feeling.

The location, isn’t brilliant being 10 minutes from a tube station, in a grotty part of town without other excellent venues, sights or landmarks to make it hip, happeneing or somewhere you would pass often. Back inside.. using the pub space as a gallery is a nice touch, it is just the pub needs a few licks of paint. Otherwise, nice shape to the bar, the staff are ok, the Qype quiz event was excellent, as was the food…thanks Qype!

Again, the old baronmeter for nightlife venues like pubs, is the toilets. So you can try and add a picture from the final whistle of the 1966 World cup final at Wembley and bowls under the taps, but if you can’t keep the floor clean, offer customers a lock on the door, soap, toilet paper or a hand dryer under 20 years old then you can’t expect good reviews.

Sports bars. The English just can't do sports bars. Absoulutely rubbish at them. They first sprung up on these shores in the eighties, when a few likely lads watched 'Cheers', noticed that american football had become popular and resolved to open bars with a few replica shirts stuck up on the wall, peanuts on the bar and a big tv screen slapped in the corner. Woeful. You'd have thought that they might have evolved from that point, but things didn't get much better. With the growth of Sky Sports in the nineties, your average pub landlord cottoned on to the fact that showing premiership football on a big screen was a good way of getting customers through the door and the sports bar was left to become just another genre in the delightful canon of 'theme bars'. Take a trip to the Sports Cafe in the West End and you'll see a common approach : gaudy decor, gaudy food and stacks of sports memorabilia hanging off the walls in a random fashion. These kinds of bars are the epitome of style (in a manner of speaking) over content and to put it quite bluntly they are completely bobbins.

Does it matter? Yes it does. It matters because it would be nice to go and watch big sporting events in a nice environment that isn't a west end hell-hole packed with tourists or a local pub rammed with rabid one-eyed 'fans'. The good news is that this kind of place does exist.

The Offside Bar & Gallery is a collaboration between Damien & Lorcan Devine (the enlightened souls behind the Old Red Lion Theatre Pub in Angel) and Mark Leech, the director of the Offside Photography Agency and one of Europe's leading sports photographers. The inspiration behind the venue, which has been open for just over two years, is Offside's database of over a million fantastic sports images, or more specifically, the opportunity to display them. The trio wanted to create the capital's first gallery space dedicated solely to sports photography, but they also wanted to add what they knew about running bars and events into the mix, so heads were put together, a suitable location was found (just round the corner from the Angel)and the Offside Bar & Gallery was born.

The first thing that sets the Offside apart then, is content. Above the bar are the offices of the photographic agency, the base for a team of photographers working at top sporting fixtures across the UK, Europe and the rest of the globe. The fruits of their labour are displayed across the exhibition space and throughout the bar, including a constant spinning slideshow on one of the monitors, the contents of which can change to suit whichever big event is next on the tv screen (you can even select and purchase your favourite print from the selection - £25 for a small print and £50 for a large). The bar has quickly become a hub for London's sports photographers and journalists and has become a regular host to various sporting events and launches.

The agency gives the bar its soul and has helped it to develop its own community (which is just what lonely Londoners are looking for isn't it?), and fortunately, the venue is also in possession of the style to go with its soul. This is a bar that does not feel like a sports bar. There's no day-glo in evidence, and certainly no signed baseball gloves stuck to the walls. Instead it can offer a relaxed and low-key environment that feels like it isn't trying too hard. In attempting to describe the decor, the word 'Cuban' sprang to mind, which admittedly is a very pretentious way of describing it, but that's just what all the wooden furniture and dark leather sofas seemed to 'evoke' (Laurence Llewlelyn-Bowen eat your heart out). It's smart, but lived in, and stylish, without feeling pretentious, and everywhere you look there's a great photograph that demands a closer look.

In keeping with the lack of pretension, the bar menu is straightforward and very well priced. I snacked on a sausage baguette with chips and salad and very nice it was too, especially the chips, which were proper 'chips' with a lovely crispy shell...they were chip chips, not fries....British chips....God save the Queen.

Sorry, got sidetracked there, it's nearly lunchtime. The venue has a late licence till 2am, so there's plenty of time for serious revelry, and is also available for hire. Talking to Richard, the bar manager, and Lorcan, you get a very clear feel for the ethos behind the bar, which is combining a passion for sports photography and good bars with a desire to create a space for sports fans to watch big games in a non-partisan atmosphere. The Offside Bar & Gallery is less about what colours you wear and more about celebrating good sport. It rocks. And so I urge anyone who takes their sport-watching seriously to go check it out. You won't be disappointed. Oh, and look out for the nice little touches, such as the commentary from the big screen being piped through to the gents...I love stuff like that.