The best cocktail bars in London

London gloriously sways with its cocktail bars.

There are bars where the counters glisten with ice shavings, bars where whisky bottles make the whole place glow orange, bars where cocktails come in Chinese noodle boxes. There are bars where bartenders serve drinks between dancers legs, and bars where men in white jackets pour out gins the size of your fist and expect you to order three more.

We have plenty to choose from, plenty of brilliant places that aren't on this list. This is a list of the type of bar where the drink is king, where only top shelf ingredients will do. They are all cocktail bars in the classic sense: elegant, perhaps a touch formal, worth dressing up for. You could quite easily get completely and utterly ruined at these places, but they are, regrettably, the sort of place where it's best to pretend you're not.

The list is in no particular order.