Velvet Lounge Bar

History

Opened 17 October 2025, as the Velvet Lounge Bar

McQueen's

May 2014 to September 2015

Skool

From 29 November 2024

Velvet Lounge Bar

From 17 October 2025

The building at 18-22 Devonshire Street has been a bank, a tapas bar, an old-school dance bar and now a lounge, the last two within a year of each other. A business directory lists the Alliance & Leicester here. The licence was first applied for in April 2014, a month before McQueen's opened, a modern lounge bar that served tapas from May 2014 until it shut on 26 September 2015.

Skool opened on Friday 29 November 2024 as a bar for nineties and early two-thousands dance music, with Pete Moss, formerly a DJ on CFM, on the decks on Friday and Saturday nights. CAMRA's Solway branch surveyed it within the week and had it as an independent party bar, open Friday and Saturday only, to two in the morning, with karaoke on Fridays.

It lasted eleven months as Skool. Pete and his partner Chloe Quinn changed it on customer feedback, and it reopened as the Velvet Lounge Bar on Friday 17 October 2025, after a revamp. Skool had played old-school dance music with what Pete called a nightclub vibe; Velvet is meant to be somewhere to talk, with music from classic hits to new ones kept at background level. The room was redone with soft purple lighting and a mosaic of CDs behind the bar, the cocktail list was extended without raising prices, and seasonal cocktails are added through the year. It opens Thursday to Saturday, and the first weekend had a singer, Nikki, on the Saturday night. Its social media still carries the Skool name.

What has not changed, the owners say, is the care taken over customers. Chloe Quinn puts it down to keeping an extra watchful eye, and says people post on social media about staff helping them out of uncomfortable situations.

It belongs to the run of bars that filled Devonshire Street from about 2010, next door to the old Hell Below, with the Thin White Duke, Connelly's and Le Gall on the other side of the street.