Activity bars in London: darts, shuffleboard, mini golf and bingo

London has quietly filled up with bars you play something in. The trade calls it competitive socialising; everyone else calls it the thing you book when eleven people are coming and nobody wants to just sit down.

They work well for exactly that and badly for a quiet drink. Almost all of them charge per lane or per hour rather than per person, most require booking, and most run a minimum spend at weekends.

How to read this page. Every venue named below publicly advertises what we say it does, and the details come from the venue’s own listings, checked in September 2026. That is a statement of fact about what they offer, not a verdict on the night. Prices and opening hours change, so check the venue before you travel.

Darts

Flight Club is the original and has sites across London including Victoria, Bloomsbury, Shoreditch and Islington. Oches are booked by the hour for a group, the scoring is automatic, and it photographs everyone mid-throw, which is either the appeal or the problem.

Shuffleboard and ping pong

Electric Shuffle runs shuffleboard at Canary Wharf and London Bridge, from the same company as Flight Club. Bounce does ping pong at Old Street and Farringdon, and the Farringdon site claims the table where the game was invented.

Mini golf, of which there is a surprising amount

Swingers has crazy golf courses in the West End and the City, both with street-food traders and a strict over-18 policy after a certain hour. Puttshack at Bank, White City and Lakeside uses tracked balls and automatic scoring, which removes the arguing.

Bingo, which is not what it was

Hijingo in Shoreditch is bingo rebuilt as a light show with a purpose-made room. Bongo’s Bingo tours venues rather than holding one address, so check where it is playing rather than turning up somewhere.

The rest of it

Fairgame at Canary Wharf does modernised fairground games. Sixes does cricket nets. Boom Battle Bar and the various rage rooms around the city cover axe throwing and the smashing of crockery, which people book for hen and stag parties and enjoy more than they expect to.

For bowling, All Star Lanes and the older independents like Rowans in Finsbury Park and Queens in Bayswater are cheaper than the activity-bar operators and better for a mixed-age group. Go karting is mostly outer London: TeamSport has several sites and Capital Karts is at Barking.

Booking, and the traps

Book, always. Walk-in space exists on a Tuesday and does not on a Friday. Most sites release slots a month or two ahead and the 19:00 to 21:00 weekend window goes first.

Read the minimum spend. Weekend bookings frequently carry one, and it is per group rather than per head, so a small group pays more each.

Check the age policy. Most of these are over-18 in the evening even where children are welcome in the day, and they card at the door.

Budget per hour, not per person. A lane or an oche is typically booked for an hour or ninety minutes for a group of up to six or eight, which makes it cheap for eight people and expensive for two.

What is on at these venues as one-off events, rather than the standing offer, appears in our listings.

If the group would rather watch something than play it, the where to watch football guide covers the big-screen venues and how they handle bookings for major fixtures.