The Hanway Street Jukebox Still Doing the Work of a Playlist
A two-floor Spanish dive on the Fitzrovia-Soho seam, built around bottled Cruzcampo and a vinyl jukebox that most bars would kill to own.
The jukebox is the first thing that registers — an NSM Prestige II from the tail end of the 1970s, loaded with vinyl singles and doing the work most bars now hand to a Spotify tab. It sits on the ground floor of a narrow room on Hanway Street, the alley that runs off Tottenham Court Road and stitches the top of Soho to the bottom of Fitzrovia, and the record it plays is the record the room takes as its cue.
Bradley's calls itself a Spanish bar and means it in the loosest, most useful way — Cruzcampo and Estrella in the bottle, a Rioja and a Cava on the wine list, patatas bravas if you want something to lean the beer on. Nobody comes for the food. They come because the room has held its shape while everything around it has been redeveloped into a Pret, and because the bar keeps going down a staircase into a second room that first-timers walk straight past.
A Spanish bar with a German jukebox and no reason to change either.
Editorial Deep
The Spanish beers are the point. Cruzcampo, Estrella and Corona come out of the fridge at around £5.80 a bottle, with Estrella and San Miguel on tap alongside if you want something colder and longer. This is not a bar with a spirits programme or a cocktail list you should be studying — it is a bar with a fridge full of the right lagers and a wine shelf that runs to a Rioja and a Cava, and the drinking makes sense once you order accordingly.
At six on a weekday the ground floor is half-empty and the jukebox is audible in a way it will not be later — someone's put on a Serge Gainsbourg B-side, the light is low, and there are stools free at the bar. By ten the same room is three-deep, the music has moved to something louder off the same carousel, and the staircase to the basement has become the only route to a seat.
A working mix of Central Saint Martins students, media staff walking down from Fitzrovia offices, and a rotating cast of regulars who have been coming since before the street had a Crossrail station at the end of it. Nobody is dressed for anywhere in particular. The volume climbs after nine and the room gets tight around the door, but the crowd is the product here — it is what has kept the bar from being polished into something else, and if you want a quieter version of the same night, the basement absorbs most of it.
There is no cover, no minimum, no service charge on drinks at the bar. The wine by the glass runs in 125, 175 and 250 ml pours, which is the honest way to price a wine list and rarer than it should be. The bill is not the reason to come, but it is not the reason to leave either.
This is the best version of what a central London dive can still be — a room that has not been renovated into neutrality, a jukebox doing the work of a DJ, and a downstairs bar that rewards the people who bother to find it. Come on a weeknight around nine, order a Cruzcampo, take the stairs down. The reader it will not work for is anyone expecting a cocktail programme or a food menu worth planning around; there are ten bars within a five-minute walk built for that, and none of them have the jukebox.
Order this
Drink this.
A bottled Cruzcampo or Estrella at the downstairs bar
“Go for the jukebox and the basement. Skip if you want cocktails or food.”
A Spanish dive on Hanway Street with bottled Cruzcampo around £5.80, a downstairs bar most first-timers miss, and an NSM Prestige II jukebox loaded with vinyl singles. Come on a weeknight, order a bottle, take the stairs down. Skip if you want a cocktail programme, a food menu, or a room that has been renovated in the last thirty years.
The Verdict
