2026 is a fresh chapter for Steam. The family is at the helm, the celebrity lunches that built the place still fill the room, and a wider programme of music, comedy and wine evenings is taking root alongside them.
This is the page where most venues paste their history. Steam has plenty of it. But the page you are on is mostly about now, because 2026 has felt like the start of something new in this basement.
Steam opened in the basement at 1 St George’s Lane in 2005. The first celebrity lunch landed a couple of years later, almost by accident. The format took. The diary has been a year ahead more or less ever since.
One hundred and forty-four speakers later, the insurance-broker regulars list runs deep, the room still empties slowly after the last course, and the format that put Steam on the map is still the centre of gravity. The rest of the page is what is wrapping around it now.
The celebrity lunches still anchor the calendar. Around them, the programme has thickened. Wine club evenings on Wednesdays. Comedy on Mondays. Vinyl nights with the music industry contacts Tom has on speed dial. Private hire takes the venue most Thursdays and Saturdays. Nights that used to end at the kitchen door are now closer to four a week.
Speakers who have taken the stage at Steam across twenty years, from Olympic decathletes to household name footballers, cricket legends, boxing champions, and rugby internationals.
Browse the full archive →
Tom runs Steam day-to-day. Music industry background. A passion for good food, wine and service, and the kind of ear for a room that only comes from years of playing them. He is the one who greets you on event days, and the one who sets the running order for the wine club evenings.
Under Tom and the family, the celebrity lunches carry on as they always have. Around them, a wider programme of formats is taking shape: acoustic evenings, wine tastings, comedy nights, themed dinners. Twenty years of trust with the regulars. Twenty more in the making.
This is the next chapter, and it is just getting started.
The new era is being built in public. Here is what is going up on the about page over the coming weeks, as the pieces land.
Bios and photos for Harry the GM, Tino the bar and restaurant manager, and Jeff the head chef. Up here once the photo shoot is done.
A drawn-up plan of the basement showing the dining floor, the bar, and the stage area at the back. Useful if you are sizing up a private hire or planning a route around the room.
Hawkstone leads the list, the rest is being confirmed. Updated as the bar specs settle for the year.
Real nights, real photos. Sourced straight from Facebook and Instagram. The unedited version of what Steam looks like when it is full.
Steam sits in the insurance heartland. Within a five minute walk of the door you have the syndicate rooms of Lloyd’s, the reinsurance desks that cover every natural disaster in the Western Hemisphere, and the quiet senior brokers who decide whether a particular hurricane lands on a particular balance sheet.
Twenty years on, the basement is fuller than it has been in years. The format has not changed. The programme around it has.
That is the crowd we have built for, and the crowd that has kept coming back for two decades. The celebrity lunches work in EC3 because there is an audience here that actually wants to listen to the speakers. The wine club nights work because there is a regulars list that knows the difference between a fine pour and a fashionable one. The comedy nights and vinyl evenings work because the same people who book the lunches also want somewhere to be on the way home.
Steam is not the loudest bar in the City. It is not the newest. It is the one with the speakers the newer bars cannot book, the wine list they cannot match, and the twenty year memory of how to run a proper afternoon for people who know the difference. The next chapter is on.