London bar operator, Inception Group, will launch the sequel to its lost tube station-themed bar, Cahoots Soho, this time creating a 1940s post office in Borough.
Cahoots Postal Office, which launches October 11th, finds its home in an old railway arch within the Borough Yards development, on the edge of Borough Market.
The theme imagines that the “Cahoots Scoundrels have commandeered the mail depot transforming it into a raucous high spirits hub for distributing pilfered rations, home-brewed hooch, and cocktails featuring exotic smuggled ingredients”.
Entering through the post office shopfront, Cahoots’ guests will be greeted at the mail counter, by a ‘postie’, before being directed through a post box into a two-floor sorting area, with a capacity for 80 seated guests or 120 standing guests for private events.
The experience is headlined by a pneumatic mail-delivery tube system, that will see cocktails whizzing overhead as they are delivered to guests from the bar to tables, through a series of air-powered tubes.
The space will feature repurposed mail sack chairs and seats within a converted mail train cart. While interactive elements will feature throughout the venue, from hidden mechanical controls to functional buttons that will impact the atmospherics of the space.
Decorative elements will include "suspicious rattling parcels", carrier pigeons and even an exotic airmail freight from Cuba containing Winston Churchill's favourite cigars".
On the mezzanine level, guests will find The Dead Letter Depot: an alarm-fitted treasure trove of precious mail that never reached its destination, while guests can take a break in the Tea Corner, where repurposed telephone switchboards can be used to listen on 1940s "gossip" and "top secret dispatches".
Charlie Gilkes, co-founder of Inception Group, said “After the enormous success of the original Cahoots in Soho, which imagined the scoundrels had occupied a 1940s underground tube station and ticket hall we are very excited to be expanding the network.
"Borough market feels like the perfect location for our second opening and we are very excited to be exploring another great British institution; the post office, and have created our most immersive venue to date.”