Restaurant & Bar Fit-Out in London

Restaurants generally fall under Use Class E, the same flexible class covering shops and offices, so moving between similar uses often needs no planning permission for the change of use itself. Bars and pubs work differently: drinking establishments sit outside Class E entirely, classed as their own Sui Generis category, which means a change of use into or out of a bar almost always needs full planning permission, with no automatic right to convert between the two. A pub can add a restaurant onto the use it already has without losing that status. Turning a restaurant into a bar works the opposite way: the planning system treats that as a genuine change and requires full planning permission. Sovran establishes which category applies before a concept is committed to a lease.

Selling alcohol or serving food late into the evening requires a premises licence under the Licensing Act 2003, with a named Designated Premises Supervisor holding a personal licence. A typical application takes four to eight weeks, longer if a resident or the police object. Anywhere near residential neighbours, and in London that's most sites, an acoustic report is usually expected alongside the application, assessing how sound will be contained once the doors open on a Friday night. Playing any music, even background, needs a separate licence from PPL PRS. Sovran factors all of this into the build timeline from the outset.

Many of London's best restaurant and bar sites sit beneath residential flats, in buildings where a noise complaint can threaten a licence as easily as a bad review threatens covers. Deliveries, extraction routes and loading access all have to work within a building that never fully closes. Every day closed is a day of lost covers, which is why Sovran runs restaurant and bar projects on a fast-track schedule as standard, sequencing work to get a venue open and trading as quickly as the scope allows.

A dining room either flatters the people in it or it doesn't: whether a table by the door feels like the best seat in the house or the one nobody wants, whether a bar lit correctly makes a half-full room read as busy rather than empty. Sovran designs around exactly that, sightlines, spacing between tables that protects both intimacy and covers per square metre, a kitchen pass positioned so service actually flows.