Munich Cricket Club Tower Hill Beer Hall: Happy Hour 4-8pm

Munich Cricket Club Tower Hill is a Bavarian bierkeller underneath 9 Crutched Friars, London EC3N 2AU, right beside Fenchurch Street and Tower Hill stations. It serves Munich beer by the pint or by the one-litre stein, with Oktoberfest specials from Löwenbräu, Spaten and Paulaner at £7.75 a pint and £15 a stein. Happy hour runs from 4pm to 8pm every day and all day on Friday and Sunday, which makes this the cheapest way to drink a German beer hall stein within sight of the Tower of London.

The club describes itself as Central London's favourite German bierkeller, located under the historic streets of Tower Hill and a stone's throw from the Tower of London and Tower Bridge. The room has changed hands before: pub historians list the same arches as the Bavarian Beerhouse from around 2010 and as a Bierschenke cellar from 2019, so the site has been pouring German beer to City workers for well over a decade.

Munich Cricket Club now runs three London cellars, at Tower Hill, Victoria and Canary Wharf, and Tower Hill is the one built for parties. The official page calls it the ideal location for any celebration, and the booking line takes group enquiries for leaving drinks, birthdays and office nights. With Fenchurch Street station next door, it works as a first stop for anyone heading home to Essex after work.

The weekly programme is unusually regular for a beer hall. Monday is Munich Mondays, Tuesday is quiz night, Bundesliga and other live sport play on the screens, and a live oompah band appears weekly. During Oktoberfest, which MCC runs from 17 September to 31 October 2026, the Friday parties step it up: a £15 ticket for the Friday 23 October party includes entry, the oompah band, one stein of bier and one Bavarian pretzel.

The Oktoberfest page promises dancing on the tables, staff in lederhosen and dirndls, Bavarian games and a ceremonial tapping of the festival barrel with free beer tasters. The kegs on the list are a 30-litre Paulaner and 50-litre Löwenbräu and Spaten barrels. If you prefer a seat and a conversation, come Sunday to Tuesday, when the Oktoberfest food menu is 25% off and the band is not playing.

If you have never compared Munich breweries side by side, order the Munich Beer Taster Board at £14.95, which brings a taster of all six Munich draught beers. After that, Paulaner Hefe-Weißbier costs £7.65 a pint or £15.30 a stein, and Hacker-Pschorr Keller and Paulaner Dunkel are £7.75 a pint or £15.50 a stein. The house Munich Cricket Clubhaus session lager at 4% is the cheapest draught at £6.95 a pint.

The bottle fridge holds the deeper cuts. Augustiner Oktoberfest comes in a 500ml bottle for £7.95, and Augustiner Edelstoff, Schlenkerla Rauchbier from Bamberg and Tegernsee Hell are £7.85 each. Drivers get proper options too, including Paulaner Hefe Alkoholfrei at £5.50 and the Austrian herb lemonade Almdudler at £4.50. Cocktails, from Das Paloma to a Monkey 47 gin and tonic, are two for one during happy hour.

The kitchen menu is printed in German first, with English underneath. For a quick bar snack, Weißwurst mit Brezn, a white veal sausage with pretzel and sweet mustard, sits on the £11 small dishes list next to Obatzda, the Bavarian cheese dip. The Geschmorte Schweinshaxe, a slow-roasted pork knuckle with sauerkraut, potato dumplings and gravy, costs £25, and the Wiesn Hendl, the half roast chicken eaten in every Oktoberfest tent, costs £22 with a pretzel and red cabbage.

The München Platte is the order for a group: £45 for two or £99 for five, with pork knuckle, paprika sausage, meatloaf, Nürnbergers, chicken schnitzel, fries and pretzels. Skip the MCC loaded fries, which are fine pub food but nothing you cannot get anywhere in the City. An optional 12.5% service charge is added to every bill, so check the total before you add a tip on top.

Thursday runs until midnight and so do Friday and Saturday, and those three nights plus the Oktoberfest Friday parties are when the benches fill first. Booking is done through the website for small tables, and party packages are tailored to the group.

If there is no space, there are two good fallbacks. The Victoria branch of the same club runs the same Friday oompah party, and it is a direct District or Circle line ride from Tower Hill. For a bigger hall with games, the Bermondsey Bierkeller on Tooley Street is a walk across Tower Bridge, around twenty minutes on foot, and it keeps its doors open until 1am on Fridays and Saturdays.

Tower Hill is one of the easiest places in London to walk off a pork knuckle. Leave the Tower Hill Underground station by the main exit and the largest surviving stretch of the Roman city wall stands beside the subway steps. From there it is a few minutes to the Tower of London moat and the riverside walk under Tower Bridge.

Closer to the club, St Olave's on Hart Street is one of the few medieval churches to survive the Great Fire, and the diarist Samuel Pepys is buried there. Seething Lane Garden, a small public garden beside the church, is a calm place to wait for friends before heading down into the cellar for the band.

Address: Munich Cricket Club Tower Hill, 9 Crutched Friars, London EC3N 2AU. Hours: Monday to Wednesday 11:30am to 11pm, Thursday 11:30am to 12am, Friday and Saturday 11am to 12am, Sunday 12pm to 10pm. Nearest stations: Tower Hill on the District and Circle lines, Fenchurch Street for c2c trains, and Tower Gateway on the DLR.

Vegan platters and a vegan schnitzel are on the menu, and allergy advice is available from the team. The NYE party on 31 December is the next big date after Oktoberfest closes. Event enquiries go to towerhill@munichcricketclub.co.uk, and the Group Experiences page lists the bigger packages for office parties.