The Botanic Room

History

Opened 2025

Opened

2025

Was

A retail unit, an AGA shop and estate agents

Planning granted

19 August 2025

One of the newest venues on this site, and a shop rather than a pub before it. The ground floor of 2-2a Lowther Street was a retail unit, an AGA showroom and estate agents, until it was converted in 2025; the upper floors are still Warwick Bazaar, the vintage shop, so the building is doing two things at once.

Botanic Room Ltd was incorporated on 23 June 2025 with David McCrone as director, and the premises licence was applied for in the name of Ben Greenslade. Planning permission for the change of use came through on 19 August 2025, by which point the bar was already open, which is a more common order of events than it sounds. The licence runs to two in the morning at weekends, though it does not trade all of those hours. CAMRA surveyed it in July 2025 and recorded no cask ale, which fits: this is a cocktail bar rather than a beer house.

It sits in the newer cluster with Stanleys and Bocata rather than among the heritage pubs, on a street that has lost more than it has kept: the Bowling Green Hotel is a probation hostel now, and a few doors down at number 8 is the building that opened as the Gretna Tavern in 1916, the first pub the state opened itself, which trades today as the Last Zebra. By 1925 the Gretna took in the buildings either side of it; whether this corner was one of them is not settled.