October will pass without a London Cocktail Week for the first time since the festival launched in 2010. Organisers have confirmed that the 17th edition moves to the week commencing 15 March 2027, which leaves roughly 17 months between the last festival in October 2025 and the next one.
The move follows a change of ownership. Hannah Sharman-Cox and Siobhán Payne, who have been involved since the first year, agreed a deal in November 2025 to buy the festival from Speciality Drinks and completed it in February 2026, taking full ownership for the first time. Their reasoning for shifting the dates is congestion. October has become one of the busiest months in the calendar for London's bar trade, with international events including Bar Convent Berlin pulling bar teams and brand budgets abroad in the same window. The new March slot has also been chosen to sit clear of Easter for the foreseeable future.
It is worth remembering how small this started. The idea came from Simon Difford, who trademarked the name in 2009 and challenged Sharman-Cox, then running a drinks PR business, to put an event together. The first London Cocktail Week ran from 11 to 17 October 2010 and was built on a simple trade, with brands supplying bars with free stock so that anyone wearing a wristband could buy a discounted cocktail. Around 5,000 people came through a pop-up hub in Selfridges. By the 2020s the festival was running across more than 300 bars and had been copied in cities all over the world, which is what makes a missing year notable rather than merely inconvenient.
Not everyone in the trade will mind. Operators have argued for years that October asks too much of them at once, and a spring festival lands in a quieter trading month where a wristband promotion has more work to do. Against that, October has been a dependable footfall spike for participating bars, and losing it for a year takes guaranteed traffic away from venues already carrying higher costs. There is a fair case on each side and neither is obviously wrong.
The calendar is not empty in the meantime. Manchester Cocktail Week ran from 3 to 12 July this year, ten days of wristband cocktails across the city at £5 to £7 a serve, and the regional weeks have grown quietly while London took the headlines. The centre of gravity in British cocktail culture has been drifting out of London for a while, and a year without the capital's festival will show how far that has actually gone.
David Baddeley, founder of Boozy, said: "London Cocktail Week did more than sell wristbands. It taught a generation of British drinkers what a properly made cocktail tastes like, and you can draw a straight line from that to what people expect at home now. A year off is a shame. It is also a reminder that this category is no longer carried by one week in one city."
Boozy cans its cocktails in Greater Manchester and sells its Margarita as a fixed 200ml serve, with the full method, salt rim included, published at its Margarita recipe for anyone making one at home this autumn.
Wristband pricing always hid one detail worth knowing, which is that no two bars pour the same measure. The Cocktail ABV Calculator covers more than 100 recipes and returns the finished strength and the unit count for each one, so you can see what a Margarita actually adds up to rather than guessing at it.
Boozy asks everyone to drink responsibly. Guidance on units, weekly limits and lower risk drinking is available at drinkaware.co.uk.
