Our story
Twenty years in EC3
A basement venue that started as a wine list with a view, and turned into the City’s quiet stage for some of the biggest names in sport.
A basement venue that started as a wine list with a view, and turned into the City’s quiet stage for some of the biggest names in sport.
Steam was never meant to be a speaker venue. It was meant to be a wine bar. The events grew because the regulars asked for them, the room suited them, and nobody else in the City was doing it quite like this.
Steam Wine Bar opens in the basement at 1 St George’s Lane, a narrow street tucked between Eastcheap and Gracechurch. The plan is simple: a proper wine list, proper food, and a room that feels different from the rest of the City at five thirty.
A booker from one of the insurance firms on the street asks whether we could host a lunch with a cricketer they had met. The room seats sixty. The lunch sells out. A format is born, more or less by accident.
Rugby internationals, footballers, boxing champions, and the first of what would become a long line of cricketers. Speakers tell other speakers. Bookers tell other bookers. The events calendar starts running ahead by a year.
The regulars start bringing clients. The clients start booking their own tables. The room develops its own rhythm of faces that come back every quarter.
Sometime in 2018 we passed a hundred speakers. We did not notice at the time. The City clients kept booking, the speaker circuit kept recommending, and the room kept filling. The format stayed small and warm while the names got bigger.
The pandemic closes the doors along with every other venue in EC3. When we reopen, the first booking is already in the diary. The Cheltenham lunch that March runs at capacity. The diary comes back faster than anyone expected.
Twenty years in. Tom and the family take over the day to day. The speaker count is one hundred and forty-four and still growing. Wine club evenings and comedy nights start appearing alongside the lunches. The basement is fuller than it has been in years.
The idea, though, is still the same one we started with. A wine list, a room that feels different, and the kind of afternoon people still talk about months later.
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 owns and runs Steam. A music industry background, a long apprenticeship on the wine side, and the kind of ear for a room that only comes from years of playing them. He’s the one who greets you on event nights, and the one who sets the running order for the wine club evenings.
Under Tom, the sporting lunches carry on as they always have. Alongside them, a new layer 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’s just getting started.
Steam sits in the insurance heartland. Within a five minute walk of the door you will find 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.
Our regulars are the people who keep the world’s biggest risks covered. They deserve somewhere that matches.
That is the crowd we have built for, and the crowd that has kept coming back for two decades. The speaker lunches work in EC3 because there is an audience here that actually wants to listen to the speakers. The stories land because the room has context. And the afternoons last because there is no rush to get back to a remote meeting.
Steam is not the loudest bar in the City. It is not the newest. It is the one with the speakers the newest bars cannot book, and the wine list the newest bars cannot match, and the twenty year memory of how to run a proper lunch for people who know the difference.