Deep inside the belly of a Gothic monastery - against the chaotic orchestral symphony of ghoulish cackles, eerie techno and peals of thunder - I am wearing a transparent plastic poncho and inhaling gin and tonic through my eyeballs.

Inhale a cloud of alcohol at London's latest crazy pop-up

It’s Monday evening, and given that I’m still feeling the effects of a weekend wedding, this situation is not ideal. Clawing my way blindly around a dark, dank, foggy chamber named The Cloud - into which a breathable cocktail is being pumped at a liquor-mixer ratio of 1:3, and humidity is 140 per cent - I collide with several other hooded visitors. Though whether because our visual range has been curtailed to six inches or because we are drunk – literally – up to the eyeballs, remains as unclear as the faces before us.

Alcoholic architecture: the latest brainchild of Bompas & Parr Credit: Warren Allott

"Welcome!" sings Sam Bompas - 50 per cent of Bompas & Parr, and therefore one of the evil geniuses responsible for the quandary in which I find myself - emerging through the thick fog of dry ice. Sporting a multi-patterned three-piece suit and clutching a yellow briefcase, he is every inch our dapper Willy Wonka. It’s the perfect getup, really, for an ‘architectural foodsmith’ who spends his time creating flavour-based experiences and immersive extravaganzas for the senses.

Formerly known as The Jellymongers, Bompas and his university pal-turned-business partner Harry Parr have been concocting synaesthetic food-art installations since 2007. They’ve built glow-in-the-dark jelly for Mark Ronson and multi-sensory fireworks for Guinness. They’ve held scratch-and-sniff food screenings at Edinburgh and put boating lake bars on top of Selfridges. They have taken over entire Knightsbridge houses exhibiting food through the ages, displayed creations in the V&A and San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, and written four books detailing their adventures.

Bompas & Parr answer the PM's jelly plea

This, Alcoholic Architecture, a walk-through, breathe-in drinking dungeon beside Borough Market, is Bompas & Parr’s latest experimental pop-up, one that might neatly be subtitled ‘World’s Laziest Bar’. After all, no drinking is required in here, simply loiter within the vapourised juniper juice and your pores do the work for you.

You can only spend 50 minutes in the bar- inhaling the equivalent of one large G&T. Credit: Warren Allott

"We’ve spent five years and about £30,000 working out how to do this properly, with all the correct health and safety precautions," explains Bompas, who held the debut Alcoholic Architecture with Parr in Soho in 2009. "We want to make sure people breathe in the cocktail safely and responsibly, so worked with a respiratory scientist specialising in extreme environment medical research – space, deep sea diving, mountaineering – to calculate the rate at which people absorb alcohol through their lungs… and, to a lesser extent, their eyeballs.

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"We held the first one because we’d been making a lot of jelly – essentially, making cocktails a little bit solid - and we wondered what might happen if we made cocktails a little bit gaseous. This time we wanted to give it local relevance so researched the site and learned a lot about the area’s strong monastic tradition, as well as its relationship with alcohol."

Right beside Southwark Cathedral, the oldest Gothic cathedral in Britain, Borough was once littered with monks famous for their self-sufficient ways, their herb-growing skills, and their proficiency at turning herbs into liqueurs. It was also home to The Anchor Brewery, at one time the largest brewery in the world, and one of the first places to put hops in beer. Hence the proliferation of pubs and the Hop Exchange down the road. Chaucer even references the strength of the local stuff in his Canterbury Tales.

"Basically we wanted to create a crazy theme bar and a fun way to start the night," explains Bompas. "You can only stay in here for 50 minutes, to ensure you only inhale the equivalent of one large gin and tonic - so you can’t get too drunk."

Alcoholic architecture is open until early 2016 Credit: Warren Allott

That said, in 50 minutes you can also get as drunk as you like at the actual bar, serving drinkable, monk-themed cocktails of Buckfast Tonic wine, Chartreuse, Benedictine and Frankincense-infused gin, some out of human skulls.

"It’s always important people can drink from a real human skull at least once in their life, right?", says Bompass. In many ways, their latest breathable venture has seen the boys come home; both have lived locally for years, Bompas’ parents were married in Southwark Cathedral and he was later christened in it.

"Starting our company was, initially, entirely with a view to getting something in Borough Market," he admits. "We just wanted to sell food in the market. We looked around and thought JELLY, but at that point we hadn’t done anything whatsoever, so – quite rightly – they didn’t even answer our emails. And suddenly we had a jelly company on our hands.

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"Since then, we’ve developed a great relationship with them, and later this year we’re actually taking over the rest of this building, upstairs, which used to be the Old Borough Market Trustees Building. The British Museum of Food will feature two floors of interactive, entertaining exhibits ‘reimaging our relationship with food'." So the boys are finally getting their dream of opening a food stall in Borough Market? "Well, kind of, but we’re going for food on the most epic scale."

Alcoholic Architecture is at 1 Cathedral Street, Borough Market, London, SE1 9DE, until 2016. Tickets cost £10, £12.50 at peak times; sessions lasts 50 minutes. Book online.