Places to go out in London at night

Right, anyone who has ever tried to organise a group night out in London will know that the planning process is its own particular kind of chaos. Someone wants a bar. Someone else wants something to do. Someone is insisting they don't mind but has very obvious opinions. Someone has already been to every place that gets suggested and is doing that thing where they go "oh yeah that's fine" but in a tone that makes it very clear it is not fine.

...and then you end up going to the same place you always go to because it was the path of least resistance, and halfway through the evening someone says we should do something different next time and everyone agrees and then the whole cycle starts again.

"Where do we go out in London???"

We want to fix this for you. Not just once but forever, actually, because once your group knows what's available in this city for a proper group night out, you'll never have the same boring planning conversation again. London is absolutely full of brilliant options for groups and most of them are wildly underused because people don't know they exist or don't quite believe they'll work as well as they do.

Here are five of our absolute favourites for group nights out in London. One of them is us, which we'll get to with our customary enthusiasm, and the other four are things we would genuinely send our own friends to without hesitation. Between the five of them you've got creative, immersive, competitive, chaotic, and unapologetically silly. There is a group night in here for every kind of group and every kind of occasion and we are extremely confident about all of it.

Vibe N Paint Party Night at Art Play, Which Works for Every Group and We Will Not Accept Arguments

📍 Shoreditch and Chelsea, London 🎟️ From £25

We know what's happening in your head right now. You're reading "paint night" and calculating how many people in your group would actually be up for it. And the answer, we promise you, is all of them. Every single one. Including the person who claims they have no creative bone in their body and who will announce this loudly approximately forty-five seconds after arriving and will then spend the next two hours completely absorbed in what they're making, periodically looking up to show everyone what they've done with an expression of barely concealed delight.

Vibe N Paint at Art Play is a party night in every sense of the word. It is not a gentle hobbyist gathering. It is an energetic, music-filled, drink-in-hand evening with paintings happening and laughter happening and the very specific kind of group energy that comes from putting people who know each other in a room with a creative activity and letting them loose on it. The vibes are exactly what the name promises. The energy in the room from the moment people pick up their brushes is genuinely electric in a way that we never take for granted even though we see it every week.

What makes this such a reliably brilliant group option is that it works regardless of the occasion. Birthday party where you want something more memorable than a restaurant? Vibe N Paint. Hen do where you'd rather not spend the evening in a bar with L-plates? Vibe N Paint. Group of friends who keep saying they need to do something and finally mean it? Absolutely Vibe N Paint. Work do that actually sounds fun when you describe it? Vibe N Paint every single time. We've hosted all of these and every single one has worked brilliantly because the format is generous enough to hold whatever energy your group brings to it.

Everyone paints something completely their own. Everyone drinks something lovely. The music is on, the conversation flows, people wander over to look at what others in the group are making and the delight on faces when they see a friend has produced something unexpectedly extraordinary is genuinely one of our favourite things to witness. Then everyone goes home carrying a canvas that they made and feeling genuinely brilliant about their evening in a way that a night at a bar rarely replicates.

We're at our Shoreditch and Chelsea venues and both are perfect for group bookings. Head to our Paint Party page to see dates and book your group in. Do it before someone suggests the same bar you always go to. You'll thank us later.

Book Vibe n Paint

The Crystal Maze Live Experience, for Groups Who Want to Actually Live Inside a Television Show

📍West End, London 🎟️ From £47

If you grew up in the nineties, the Crystal Maze was formative television. Teams running around in themed zones doing physical and mental and mystery challenges to win crystals, and then the finale in that iconic dome where everyone was frantically grabbing foil tokens while a massive fan blew them around. It was completely brilliant and there was a period where every child in the country wanted to go on it more than anything else in the world.

The Crystal Maze Live Experience in London's West End has made that dream an actual reality and it is one of the most genuinely fun group experiences this city currently offers. You get your own Maze Master who guides you through the zones, each one beautifully designed and themed to feel exactly like the television show. There's Aztec, Industrial, Medieval and Futuristic, each with their own distinct atmosphere and their own range of challenges covering physical, skill, mystery and mental categories. Teams run madly between them, shout encouragement at whoever is locked inside doing the challenge, and accumulate crystals that determine your time in the Crystal Dome at the end.

The Crystal Dome finale is something we want to talk about specifically because it is one of the most objectively funny things that happens in a group night out anywhere in London. You go in convinced you're going to be efficient and strategic about grabbing the golden tokens and you spend forty seconds completely losing your mind in a hurricane of swirling foil while your friends outside are howling at you through the glass. The time goes impossibly fast. Nobody is ever as good at it as they thought they'd be. Everyone absolutely loves it.

Groups of up to sixteen can play together, which makes this genuinely brilliant for larger gatherings, and the experience takes about an hour and a half from start to finish. Reviewers consistently describe it as one of the highlights of their London visits, with comments like "exceeded expectations" and "a great team night out" and one memorably enthusiastic "childhood dream came true."

Book through the Crystal Maze website, dress comfortably, and prepare to spend the rest of the evening recounting what went wrong in the Aztec zone in increasingly dramatic terms.

Junkyard Golf Club, the Crazy Golf Night Out That Goes Absolutely Sideways in the Best Way

📍 Camden and Shoreditch, London 🎟️ From £12

Junkyard Golf Club in Shoreditch and Camden has done something quite specific with the format of crazy golf, which is to take it and submerge it completely in a nightclub atmosphere built from reclaimed junk and neon light and absolute chaos, add a cocktail menu that features things called Slush Puppies and serve them in vessels that make you feel like you're twelve and at the best birthday party of your life, and then just let the whole thing run. The result is a group night out that is genuinely impossible to have a bad time at.

There are three nine-hole crazy golf courses at the Shoreditch venue, named Gary, Dirk and Bozo, which tells you exactly the kind of energy we're dealing with here. Each one is built from pre-loved and reclaimed materials in completely different themes covering things like UV garages, scrapyard slides, circus freaks and jungle bathtubs. The holes are inventive and often baffling and occasionally genuinely difficult, and all of this in a venue that is deliberately loud and deliberately silly and deliberately the opposite of taking itself seriously.

The competitive element within a group is what makes Junkyard so brilliant. Something happens when you're all playing the same holes and everyone has an opinion about the best line to take and someone completely flukes a hole in one and everyone is outraged on behalf of the person who'd been trying for three shots. The banter escalates naturally, the drinks help, the UV rave room in the Shoreditch venue is something people consistently describe as the thing they never wanted to leave, and by the time you finish your round the group has had a full evening of connection and laughter that a bar simply couldn't have produced.

Book a cocktail package because they're well priced and it removes the back and forth of individual ordering, and arrive ready to take the whole thing slightly less seriously than you planned.

Shoreditch is at 94 Brick Lane and Camden is at Chalk Farm Road. Both are brilliant and both will make your group chat very active for the next few days.

Mamma Mia The Party, for Groups Who Want a Full Blown Event Rather Than Just a Night Out

📍 Vauxhall, London 🎟️ From £99 per person

This one is a step up in occasion and price and we want to be upfront about that, but we also want to be upfront about the fact that it is one of the most purely joyful group experiences available in London and for a significant occasion it is absolutely worth every penny. Mamma Mia The Party is not a West End musical. It's not dinner and a show in the traditional sense. It is a full immersive dining and theatrical experience that takes over an extraordinary venue on the Thames and turns it into a Greek taverna where a story unfolds around your table across a four-course meal while you dance and sing and have a completely extraordinary evening.

The production is based on the ABBA songs and the Mamma Mia universe and it was developed by Björn Ulvaeus himself, which should tell you something about the level of creative intent behind it. The venue has been completely transformed to feel like a genuine Greek island setting, and from the moment you sit down you are part of the world rather than watching it from the outside. Actors interact with the audience throughout, performances happen right next to your table, and the whole thing builds in energy until the final act where everyone is on their feet dancing to ABBA songs in a room full of people who are completely and collectively having the best time.

For a birthday, an anniversary, a hen party, a group celebration of any kind, this is the option that makes the occasion feel genuinely special rather than just a nice evening. The food is a proper four-course Greek meal and it's good, the drinks flow throughout, and there are few things in life quite as joyful as a room full of people all dancing to Dancing Queen together at eleven o'clock on a Saturday night. Book well in advance because it sells out regularly and deservedly so.

The London venue is at the Pleasure Gardens in Vauxhall. Go as a group. Wear something you can dance in. Surrender completely to the ABBA and the ouzo and the atmosphere and you will leave absolutely euphoric.

Lucky Voice Karaoke, Because Sometimes the Group Night Out Needs to Be Completely Unhinged

📍 Soho and Islington, London 🎟️ From £6 per person

We're ending with this one because sometimes what a group genuinely needs is a private room, a microphone, a songbook with thirty-five thousand options, and approximately two hours of absolutely no inhibitions whatsoever. Lucky Voice is London's best-loved private karaoke bar and it has venues in Soho and Islington and it has been the setting for some of the most spectacularly chaotic and joyful group nights out this city has ever produced.

The private room format is the thing that makes karaoke actually work for a group. You're not performing for strangers in a bar hoping they're vaguely tolerant of your Mariah Carey. You're in your own room with your people, and that changes everything. The inhibitions that would stop someone from attempting a full Beyoncé number in public simply don't exist when you're surrounded by your own group and everyone is equally committed to the bit. Rooms hold between three and twenty people, cocktails and food are delivered directly to your room so you never have to leave, and the song selection is genuinely vast.

Lucky Voice takes a minimum spend per room rather than a flat entry fee, which means the more people you bring the better the value, and the cocktails are properly good and come in sharing jugs for the group. Some of the most important things to know about karaoke with a group are firstly that someone always surprises everyone with a genuinely brilliant voice, secondly that someone else always commits to the worst possible song choice with the most extraordinary confidence, and thirdly that whatever the group dynamic was when you walked in, it will be significantly warmer and more connected by the time you leave. Karaoke does something to people. Lucky Voice is the best place in London to let it do that thing.

Book your room online for the Soho venue on Poland Street or Islington on Upper Street. Go on a Thursday or Friday evening if you want to make a full night of it afterwards. And make sure someone in the group is officially designated to tell the story of what happened in that room for the next month because it will absolutely be worth telling.

Putting it All Together

Five nights out. Five completely different energies. All of them brilliant for groups and all of them significantly better than whatever the planning chat eventually default-settles on when everyone's been going back and forth for too long.

Our suggestion, and we're going to keep making it because we genuinely mean it, is to start with Vibe N Paint at Art Play. It's the group night that creates something, that gives everyone an individual experience within a shared one, and that sends people home with a canvas and a very good story. The combination of creativity and cocktails and the specific energy of a group of people all painting together is one we've never seen fail to produce a brilliant evening.

Book your paint party before the group chat descends into chaos again. You've got the five options, now just pick one and commit. London is waiting.