Fun things to do in London for young adults

Let's be completely honest with each other for a second. There's a version of your London social life that involves standing in a very loud bar paying nine pounds for something that tastes mostly of ice, shouting over music you didn't choose, and getting home at midnight feeling vaguely like the evening could have been more than that. And that's fine occasionally. But London is one of the most extraordinary cities on the planet and it would be a genuine shame to spend your twenties only doing that.

Because London, when you actually dig into it, is absolutely overflowing with things to do that are exciting and memorable and actually give you something at the end of the evening beyond a receipt and a slightly dry mouth. Things that are fun in a way that still feels fun the next day. Things that make for a brilliant story rather than a blurry photo of the same bar you went to three weekends ago.

We've put together five of our favourites. These are real, brilliant, genuinely fun things to do in London as a young adult, and we're completely confident that every single one of them beats a Thursday night in a generic cocktail bar by a significant margin. One of them is us, obviously, and we will always be upfront about that, but we also genuinely believe what we're about to say so stay with us.

Free Flow Painting at Art Play, and Before You Say Anything, Just Hear Us Out

📍Shoreditch and Chelsea, London 🎟️ From £18

We know. We know what you're thinking. Painting sounds like something you'd do on a rainy Sunday afternoon with a cup of tea and a Kit Kat. It doesn't sound like a Friday night. But free flow painting at Art Play is one of those experiences where you go in a little bit sceptical and come out wondering why you don't do this every single week, and we've seen it happen hundreds of times.

Free flow is completely unguided and completely yours. You come in, you sit down, you pick up a brush, you paint whatever you want, at whatever pace you want, for as long as you want. There's no instructor at the front of the room telling you what to do, no template to follow, no pressure to make it look like anything in particular. It's just you and a canvas and a ridiculous amount of colour and the freedom to make literally whatever comes out of you.

"🤩 The atmosphere is vibrant and welcoming."

What happens to most people in a free flow session is something that's genuinely quite hard to describe until you've experienced it. The outside world just switches off. The stuff you've been carrying around all week, the work stress, the WhatsApp group you've been meaning to reply to, the general low-level hum of being a person in a city, all of it just goes quiet while your brain gets absorbed in what's in front of you. It's the kind of mental reset that usually costs you a lot of money at a wellness retreat, and at Art Play it costs you the price of a session and you get a painting at the end of it.

Bring your mates and it becomes a social occasion in the best possible way. Everyone's making something different, you keep wandering over to see what other people are doing, someone's canvas looks completely wild and everyone else is obsessed with it, someone else has gone unexpectedly minimalist and it's stunning, and the conversation that flows while you're all painting together is somehow better and more relaxed than any conversation you'd have sitting across a table from each other.

We've got coffee and we've got cocktails and we've also got pizza if you want to make a proper evening of it, so you're not sacrificing the social elements of a night out, you're just adding something genuinely brilliant on top.

Sessions are available across the week and at weekends, at our Shoreditch venue and our Chelsea spot on King's Road. Head to Art Play's FreeFlow Painting page to book and see what's available. Come once and you'll understand what we mean immediately.

Book Your Walk in Paint Session

Hijingo in Shoreditch, Because Bingo Just Got Completely Unrecognisable

📍 Shoreditch, London 🎟️£14 to £85.27 per person

If someone told you a few years ago that bingo was going to become one of the coolest nights out for young adults in London you would have laughed them out of the room. And yet. Here we are. And Hijingo is the reason why.

Hijingo is not your grandmother's bingo. Hijingo is bingo that has been put through the filter of a dystopian Tokyo fever dream, given stadium-grade lighting and floor-to-ceiling LED screens, handed a killer soundtrack, and then told to go absolutely wild.

The venue on Worship Street in Shoreditch is 8,000 square feet of futuristic fun and from the moment you walk through the Lucky Cat Bar entrance and travel down the flashing lit hallway into the main room, you know you're somewhere completely different.

The numbers are called by a voice-of-god narrator rather than a host, because Hijingo is actually the world's first hostless bingo show, which sounds like a strange selling point until you're in the room and you realise it creates this incredible collective tension where the whole crowd is just completely locked into what's happening on the screens. The Hijingobots, which are robot dancer performers who move through the space, are something you genuinely have to see to believe. The prizes are not a set of coasters. They are cash jackpots. Holidays. Things people actually want.

The food is Asian-inspired street food that is genuinely excellent, the cocktail list is creative and properly good, and on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays there's late-night music and dancing after the bingo so you don't have to call it a night just because the game is over. There's also a Bingo Bottomless Brunch on Saturdays and Sundays which is exactly as chaotic and wonderful as it sounds.

From around £14 per person to play, this is extraordinary value for what it delivers. Book online because it sells out and the disappointment of being turned away from Hijingo is not something we wish on anyone.

Netil360 Rooftop Bar in Hackney, for When You Want the View Without the Price Tag

📍 Hackney, London 🎟️ From £9.50 per cocktail

There is a specific kind of London rooftop bar problem that young adults know all too well. You see the pictures on Instagram, you want to go, you look at the booking requirements, you see the minimum spend, and the dream dies quietly in a restaurant booking app. Netil360 in Hackney is the rooftop bar that actually exists for people who want the panoramic London skyline and the good vibes without the corporate pricing structure attached.

It's perched on top of Netil House in London Fields, a nine-flight stair climb that we promise is completely worth it, and when you come out at the top you get one of the most genuinely lovely views of the London skyline available to anyone who doesn't work in a glass tower. The whole city spreads out in front of you in every direction, and the venue itself has this brilliant unpretentious energy that makes it feel like you've discovered your new favourite spot rather than checked into a corporate venue.

The drinks are local and well-priced. Craft beers from Five Points Brewery, spirits from East London Liquor Company, natural wine, cocktails, and all of it at prices that don't make you do a quiet intake of breath when the bill arrives. The pizzas are Neapolitan, made fresh to order, and absolutely the right thing to eat on a rooftop with a cold drink and the whole city below you. At weekends there are DJs playing soul, hip-hop, house and disco that bring the whole place alive without it ever tipping into somewhere that feels like it's trying too hard.

Walk-ins are welcome most of the time, which is a radical concept for a London rooftop bar and one that we deeply appreciate. Get there before it fills up on sunny days because the crowd is young and local and it does get busy quickly, and for entirely understandable reasons. It's at 1 Westgate Street in Hackney, two minutes from London Fields station. Free entry. Brilliant views. Come as you are.

Tate Modern Lates, Free Art Into the Evening Every Friday and Saturday

📍 South Bank, London 🎟️ FREE

This one has a fact in it that we think a genuinely surprising number of young Londoners don't know, and we feel slightly responsible for spreading it. Tate Modern now stays open until 9pm every Friday and Saturday evening. For free. The world's most visited modern art museum, on the South Bank, with its extraordinary permanent collection and whatever the current major exhibition is, is open late every Friday and Saturday and you can walk in for nothing.

This happened because of young people, which we find very satisfying. After Tate Modern's 25th birthday weekend in 2025 drew 76,000 visitors over three days with 70% of them under 35, the gallery announced the late openings as a direct response. Young Londoners turned up in enormous numbers to be in a museum and the museum said great, we're staying open longer for you. We love to see it.

Going to Tate on a Friday evening after work is a completely different experience to going on a Saturday afternoon with the crowds. The light through the Turbine Hall at dusk is genuinely stunning. The exhibitions feel more intimate when the daytime rush has thinned out. And there is something about walking through rooms of extraordinary art with a bit of music from the bar floating through the building, glass in hand at the end of a week, that does something genuinely restorative.

The monthly Tate Modern Lates events go even further with DJs, performances, workshops and curated evening programming that has previously included Little Simz, Aphex Twin listening sessions, and live performances that turn the gallery into something that feels completely different to how people usually think about a museum. These are free at the door too, though some specific events within the evening are ticketed. Keep an eye on the Tate website for upcoming Lates because they sell out quickly and the programming is always genuinely brilliant.

Brick Lane Street Food and Vintage Market Crawl

📍 Shoreditch, London 🎟️ FREE to enter

This one doesn't have a booking link and doesn't need one because it's one of the best ways to spend an afternoon and early evening in London that requires nothing from you except turning up and being curious about the world.

Brick Lane on a Sunday is one of London's great free pleasures and honestly one of the most genuinely fun ways to spend a few hours in this city. The street itself is lined with bagel shops and curry houses and independent coffee spots and vintage clothing shops that go from the slightly organised to the completely chaotic pile-of-stuff-in-a-room variety, and the whole thing has this irreplaceable energy of a place where nobody is putting on a performance, everyone's just there because they love being there.

The Backyard Market and Truman Brewery markets that run off the main street are home to independent makers, vintage sellers, street food traders and artists flogging prints and the kind of things you end up buying on impulse and genuinely loving for years. The street food at the Sunday market is exceptional. You can eat your way around five different cuisines in an afternoon for under a tenner if you play it right, which is a deeply satisfying way to spend a Sunday.

Then as the afternoon tips into evening, wander down to Shoreditch, which is right there, and see what the night brings. Maybe you end up at Hijingo. Maybe you find a bar you've never been to before. Maybe you walk past Art Play Shoreditch and book a free flow session for next week because you read something recently about how brilliant it is.

London when you explore it on foot, without a plan, is endlessly generous. It gives you things to discover around every corner and it costs you nothing to wander into. Brick Lane on a Sunday is one of the best reminders that this city's best quality is how much it has to offer even when you're not spending anything.

The Short Version of All of This

London is brilliant. Young adult London is particularly brilliant if you know where to look. None of these five things require a huge budget, none of them require a dress code, and all of them will give you a better story at the end of the evening than most alternatives we can think of.

Start with us. Come and paint something free flow at Art Play and see what happens when you give yourself a few hours with no agenda beyond making something. We promise it will be one of those evenings where you arrive thinking this'll be fun and leave thinking that was actually one of the best nights I've had in a while.

Book a your Walk-in Paint Session and come and find us. We'll have everything ready. You just need to show up.