Fun nights out in London for groups

Right, so here's the thing about going out in London at night. The city has this reputation for being one of the greatest nightlife destinations on the planet and honestly the reputation is completely deserved, but only if you know where to actually go. Because for every brilliant, memorable, genuinely exciting night out London has to offer, there are also a hundred mediocre bars that look great on Google Maps, charge eleven pounds for a gin and tonic that tastes mostly of ice, and leave you standing in a corner of a room that's a bit too loud going is this it then.

It doesn't have to be like this. London at night is extraordinary when you stop defaulting to the obvious and start exploring what this city is actually hiding. We're talking experiences that feel genuinely special the moment you walk through the door. Places with atmosphere and personality and something actually happening that isn't just background music and overlit booths. Nights out that you're still talking about the following weekend because something about them got under your skin in the best possible way.

We've put five of our absolute favourites together. One of them is us, obviously, and we'll come to that with great enthusiasm in a moment. The other four are places we genuinely love and rate and would happily recommend to anyone who asked. Across the five of them you've got creativity, jazz, darts, cocktails, and something involving a ball pit that we'll explain in due course. London nights don't get much more varied than this.

Vibe N Paint Party Night at Art Play and Yes This is a Night Out

📍 Shoreditch and Chelsea, London 🎟️ From £25 🔗 Book now

We want to address something immediately, which is the assumption that a painting session is a daytime activity for people who like herbal tea and Radio 4. That assumption is completely wrong and the Vibe N Paint Party Night at Art Play is the proof.

This is a proper evening out. Full stop. There's music and there's energy and there are drinks that are genuinely excellent and there's a room full of people who have come out specifically to do something fun and creative and a bit different, and what that combination produces is consistently one of the best atmospheres of any night out we know in London. The difference between sitting on a barstool pretending to have a good time and standing in front of a canvas with a cocktail in your hand actually having one is enormous and we think once you've experienced the second version you'll find it very hard to go back to the first.

Vibe N Paint is specifically designed as an evening event. You come in, the room is set up, the vibes are exactly what the name promises, and you paint. What you paint is completely up to you. We give you the canvas and all the materials and the space and the music and the drinks, and then we let you do your thing at your own pace without any pressure to produce something that looks like what anyone else is making. Some people get wildly abstract. Some people do something surprisingly intricate and detailed. Some people paint something that makes everyone around them go oh that is genuinely brilliant and everyone wants to know how they did it. The results are always completely different from person to person and consistently wonderful.

The Vibe N Paint experience is brilliant for so many different nights out. A birthday where you want to do something more memorable than a restaurant. A hen do that goes somewhere truly unexpected. A group of friends who've done every bar on the strip and want something new. A date night that gives you both something to do and talk about rather than the slightly anxious performance of dinner conversation. All of these work brilliantly. All of these become a story rather than just an evening.

We're in Shoreditch and Chelsea and both venues have everything you need for a brilliant night. Check out Vibe n Paint on the Art Play website to see what's coming up and grab your spot.

Come ready to have fun, leave carrying something you made, feel absolutely brilliant about your evening. That's the plan and it works every single time.

Book Your Paint Party

Nightjar in Shoreditch, the Speakeasy That Makes You Feel Like You've Stepped Out of Time

📍 Shoreditch, London 🎟️ Cocktails from £13

There are bars in London that are good and then there are bars in London that are an actual experience, and Nightjar on City Road in Shoreditch is firmly in the second category. From the moment you descend the stairs and your eyes adjust to the candlelit darkness below, something genuinely changes. The city above disappears. The noise and the pace and the general modern chaos of London in the twenty-first century just evaporates and what you step into instead is a beautifully realised 1920s speakeasy where the cocktails are extraordinary and the live music will stop you mid-sentence.

The cocktail menu at Nightjar is the kind of thing you actually read slowly rather than scanning for a gin and tonic. It's divided into pre-prohibition, prohibition, post-war and Nightjar signature serves, and every single drink has a personality and a story behind it. The bartenders are genuinely skilled in a way that's proper to watch, doing things with ingredients you've never encountered in combinations you wouldn't have thought to put together, and the results are consistently stunning. This is cocktail making taken seriously without ever tipping into pretentious, which is a very careful balance to strike and they strike it brilliantly.

Live music starts at nine every night, jazz and blues and ragtime and swing that fills the room from a small stage and wraps around the whole evening like a second atmosphere. Nightjar has been described as "a basement bar that manages to entirely suspend reality, giving guests an experience straight out of the roaring 20s, with live music and decadent cocktails." We'd agree with every word of that.

Booking ahead is strongly recommended, particularly at weekends where live music slots can book up over six weeks in advance. There are walk-in tables available on a first come first served basis but if you want to guarantee a seat, plan ahead. It's seating only throughout, which we think is exactly right because this is an evening that deserves to be settled into properly rather than spent hovering near a bar. Go with someone whose company you really enjoy because Nightjar makes wonderful evenings feel even more so.

Flight Club Social Darts, Because Darts Just Became the Most Fun Thing You'll Do This Month

📍 Multiple Locations, London 🎟️ From £9 per person

If someone had told us five years ago that one of London's most genuinely brilliant nights out would involve throwing darts, we might have raised an eyebrow. And yet here we are completely unable to argue with the evidence because Flight Club is one of those rare places that does exactly what it promises and then delivers significantly more than expected on top.

Flight Club has taken darts to a luxurious new level with a twist of technology to smooth things along. Each board sits under the gaze of three precision cameras that identify the location of every dart thrown with sub-millimetre accuracy, keeping score, tracking whose turn it is, and proudly announcing the winner's victory on a big screen. Which means all you have to do is throw the dart and talk absolute rubbish to your friends about their throwing technique, which is genuinely most of the fun.

There are multiple London locations now including Shoreditch, Victoria, Angel and Bloomsbury, so there's almost certainly one near wherever you're starting your evening, and all of them share the same brilliant combination of beautifully designed venues, genuinely good food and cocktails that you can order directly to your board, and staff who are excellent at making the whole evening run smoothly. The sharing cocktails arrive in ridiculous vessels that make everyone at the board slightly too excited. The pizzas are exactly the right food to eat while someone lines up a shot. The competitive energy between a group of friends escalates steadily throughout the evening in the most delightful way.

Flight Club describes their experience as bringing groups as small as six or as large as 650 together, and they build incredible events to effortlessly do exactly that. Whether it's four of you on a Thursday night or a large group celebrating something, the format adapts completely and works every time. Book an oche in advance especially at weekends because Flight Club is busy for entirely good reasons and you don't want to be left throwing darts in your imagination on the pavement outside.

Alcotraz, London's Prison Cocktail Bar Where You Are the Main Character

📍 Hackney and near Covent Garden, London 🎟️ From £25

We need you to set aside any scepticism you have for the duration of this paragraph and just trust us because Alcotraz is one of those experiences that sounds on paper like it might be a bit much and is in practice one of the most genuinely entertaining, brilliantly conceived nights out in London right now.

The concept is this. You are a prisoner. You arrive, you are given an orange jumpsuit, you are escorted by actors playing outrageously committed prison guards into a genuinely well-built prison set with cells and a warden who has absolutely no sense of humour about rule breaking. And then, inside, the inmates make you cocktails. Not from a menu, because you smuggled your own base spirit in past the guards on the way in and now the prisoners take your contraband and combine it with their own homemade syrups and liqueurs to create completely bespoke cocktails based on your tastes. Every drink is different. Every drink is made specifically for you.

The actors stay completely in character for the entire duration of the experience without a single break and this is what elevates Alcotraz from a fun concept to a genuinely brilliant night. There's a storyline that develops throughout the evening, secret missions you can get involved in, interactions with characters that take completely unexpected turns, and a collective energy in the room of people who all surrendered to the bit and are absolutely loving every second of it. You arrive as people who weren't sure what to expect and you're laughing so hard within twenty minutes that you've forgotten to be self-conscious about your orange jumpsuit.

There are London locations in Hackney Road and near Covent Garden, the experience runs for about an hour and forty-five minutes, it's strictly for adults, and you need to bring your spirit of choice from outside. Booking is essential and available on their website. Take a group who enjoy committing to a bit. Leave with significantly better cocktail stories than you came with.

Ballie Ballerson, the Ball Pit Bar That Requires No Further Justification

📍 Shoreditch, London 🎟️ From £8

We're ending on this one because it is the most joyful, most unapologetically brilliant, most genuinely fun thing on this list and we believe very strongly that everyone in London should have done Ballie Ballerson at least once. If you haven't been yet, this is your sign.

Ballie Ballerson on Curtain Road in Shoreditch and on Berwick Street in Soho contains over one million neon glowing balls across two enormous ball pits. The ceiling is mirrored so the whole thing looks infinite. There's UV lighting and smoke and live DJs and a cocktail menu that leans into pure nostalgia with drinks named things like Dibbie Dabberson and Snap Bubble and Pop, which come with edible decorations from your childhood and taste better than they have any right to. The entire venue is designed to make you feel like an eight year old who discovered that the coolest adults in the world also love ball pits, which is the specific feeling we should all be chasing on a Friday night.

The energy in Ballie Ballerson is unlike anything else in London nightlife. People arrive slightly uncertain and leave absolutely buzzing, which is the exact trajectory a great night out should follow. There's a reason Time Out named it London's best activity bar and there's a reason the queues are what they are. Bottomless brunch packages are available from £20 on Saturdays and Sundays and are deeply, thoroughly recommended. Book ahead and go with people who don't take themselves too seriously. The ball pit is not for the precious.

The Short Version of All of This

Five places. Five completely different energies. Five nights out that prove London after dark is one of the best things about living in or visiting this city, provided you know where to point yourself.

Our recommendation, and we are biased and we are also right, is to start with Vibe N Paint at Art Play because it's the night out that gives you something to take home. You paint something in a room full of energy and music and good drinks and you carry that canvas out at the end of the evening feeling genuinely great about your night and yourself.

Book your Paint Night at Art Play and then work through the rest of this list at your leisure.

London is waiting. Go and enjoy it properly.