Coin Laundry

Exmouth Market and the Bar That Keeps Reinventing Itself

Exmouth Market occupies a particular position in London's drinking geography. The street runs through Clerkenwell, a neighbourhood that spent decades as a trade and craft district before its current life as a dense mix of design studios, media offices, and restaurants. The bars here don't operate in isolation from that context: the clientele skews professional, the pace after 6pm is purposeful rather than tourist-driven, and venues that survive do so by holding the loyalty of a repeat local crowd while remaining interesting enough to draw people from elsewhere. Coin Laundry, at number 70, has been part of that calculus long enough to have gone through meaningful change.

A Street With Opinions About Drinks

Exmouth Market has always had a higher concentration of drinking options than its length might suggest. The street functions as an after-work corridor for the EC1 postcode, which includes the Barbican's edge, Farringdon, and the southern fringe of Islington, and that audience has grown more demanding over time. What London's cocktail scene broadly experienced through the 2010s, the shift from novelty-led theatre toward technically grounded programs and cleaner menus, played out at the neighbourhood level too. Venues that were trading on atmosphere alone found the ground shifting. Coin Laundry's evolution tracks that pressure.

For comparison, bars like 69 Colebrooke Row, a short walk north in Islington, helped define what technically serious cocktail work looked like in London before the category crowded. A Bar with Shapes For a Name and Academy represent the current generation of London bars operating at the sharper edge of the format. Amaro has carved out a niche through a specific product focus. Coin Laundry plays in a different register from all of them, less laboratory, more room, but the broader shift in expectations has touched every bar in the city, including this one.

The Reinvention Pattern at 70 Exmouth Market

Bars on well-trafficked London streets face a specific challenge: the address provides footfall and recognition, but it can also trap a venue in an early identity long after that identity has stopped serving it. The formats that tend to survive on streets like Exmouth Market are the ones willing to revise. Coin Laundry has done that, moving through phases that reflect both its own management decisions and the wider reorientation of London drinking culture.

The name itself gestures at something laundered and renewed, and the interior has carried versions of that sensibility through different iterations. The current direction is more settled than earlier versions, with a drinks program that has matured toward coherence rather than novelty. That trajectory is common among London bars that opened in a more concept-heavy era and have since stripped back to what actually works in a neighbourhood setting.

Across the UK, bars in comparable neighbourhood positions have found different solutions to the same pressure. Bramble in Edinburgh built a long-running reputation through consistency rather than reinvention. Schofield's in Manchester entered with a clear format and has held it. Merchant Hotel in Belfast operates inside a heritage building that itself frames the drinks program. Mojo Leeds and Horseshoe Bar Glasgow lean on deep local loyalty. Each approach reflects the city and the audience. Coin Laundry's answer has been adaptation, reading what the Clerkenwell crowd wants from one phase to the next.

Who Goes and When

The Exmouth Market demographic is worth understanding before you plan a visit. The street peaks hard between 6pm and 9pm on weekdays, when the surrounding offices empty into the outdoor tables and ground-floor bars. Weekend daytime is quieter and more mixed. Coin Laundry absorbs both moods, which is itself a measure of how the format has been tuned: a bar that only works for one type of crowd at one time of day has a narrower base than it needs on a street this competitive.

For visitors approaching from further afield, Farringdon and Angel tube stations both put you within comfortable walking distance, the bar sits in a cluster of options that makes Exmouth Market worth spending an evening on rather than treating as a single stop. The street's food options have also strengthened over the years, which means Coin Laundry functions naturally as part of a longer evening rather than a destination in isolation.

Internationally, bars in comparable neighbourhood-anchor positions, Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu and L'Atelier Du Vin in Brighton among them, demonstrate that the neighbourhood bar format, when executed with genuine program discipline, holds its own against more high-profile competition. The same logic applies here.

Planning a Visit

Exmouth Market is accessible from Farringdon (Elizabeth line, Circle, Hammersmith and City, and Metropolitan lines) or Angel (Northern line), with both stations placing you inside a ten-minute walk. The street itself runs east-west and number 70 sits toward the western end. Weekday evenings draw the densest crowd; if you want the room at a lower pitch, weekend afternoons offer a different experience of the same space. Walk-ins are the standard approach for a bar in this format and at this address, though peak-hour timing on a Friday will test patience if you want a specific spot.