I visited seven themed bars in one week. Can ball pits and bingo save British nightlife? | Life and style

British hospitality is in crisis. In the first quarter of 2026, three hospitality sites closed every day, while one in five remaining businesses fear collapse over the next year owing to rises in tax and employment costs. For those venues struggling to make ends meet in London in particular, there is the added worry of increasingly stringent licensing rules and influential lobby groups making once-thriving areas such as Soho a ghost town after 11pm.

And yet one hospitality niche seems to be bucking the trend: themed bars. Blending booze with, say, axe-throwing, darts, immersive theatre or adult-sized ball pits, these experiential venues have seen a boom in recent years. A report from Savills estate agents found a 58% increase in “competitive socialising” venue openings in 2025 compared with 2018, while another survey found one in three adults had visited one of these venues in the UK in 2024-25. Photo-friendly interiors have made many of them a hit on social media, too.

With younger generations drinking less but still wanting spaces to socialise, could themed bars be the future of British nightlife? I booked myself into seven of London’s most popular and outrageously themed bars to find out.

Down the cobbled back streets of the City of London lies a falafel shop with a secret: in its basement is a bar wired with microphones ready to record your every word. Aptly dubbed the First Podcast Bar – since no one else has yet had the bright idea of combining alcohol with audio publishing equipment – the venue has been open for six months and is the brainchild of restaurateur Uri Dinay.

Dinay, who already has seven restaurants, initially had other plans. “I thought we’d make this basement into a pitta bread factory, but before we did anything with it I invited friends and staff over,” he says into the microphone as we sit sipping pints. “They wanted to ask me questions about my life and career, so I thought: why not make it into a podcast? That’s how it all started.”

In theory, anyone who wanders into the bar on their event nights can sidle up to the mic and start chatting. Tonight, I have the awkward experience of speaking with him as a crowd of a dozen friends and family eavesdrop, drink and chat among themselves.

It’s a deeply overstimulating environment. The music is thumping, people are talking over each other, and I have the lingering feeling that everything I’m doing is going to land on YouTube. “I have loads of footage of people being drunk and crazy – but I’d never publish it,” Dinay reassures me. “Don’t worry, I’m a good guy!”

I bring a friend with me, who is training to be a therapist. She spends much of the evening trying to avoid cameras and microphones. “This feels like a disaster waiting to happen,” she says.

I head home with my ears ringing and a sore throat, vowing silence for the following day and feeling no closer to an answer of why anyone would choose a podcast-themed bar over a quiet pint.

Founded by rapper Stormzy in 2024, House Party is a seven-storey, glass-fronted building in Soho designed to replicate a party at someone’s home. Intrigued, I cough up £15 to attend something I would otherwise do for free.

At this point I should say that in the week I visit these bars, the UK hits its hottest June on record. England are also about to play Ghana in the World Cup, so the mood in Soho is even more febrile than usual as I approach the bar. Thankfully, there is air-conditioning – and the cool air blows through a decor of 1970s floral-patterned carpets and lurid wallpaper. The vibe is confusing: a DJ in the kitchen plays ear-splitting mashups of Vindaloo and Come On Eileen; drinks are served in American-style red cups; a staff member is trying to start karaoke in the bedroom; and upstairs, in the living room, a woman who calls herself “Grandma” offers me “a blow on her vuvuzela”. I politely decline.

My friend and I find a quiet nook with a sofa and a TV showing the football, but before he can explain the offside rule to me, we’re kicked out by a corporate booking. Relegated to the basement, where yet more strangers are uneasily sharing a sofa, I realise this is the most authentic teenage house party experience of all: feeling unwelcome and awkward in someone else’s space.

Why would anyone pay for this, I wonder. Ben Floyd, the founder of hospitality consultancy Lumière, puts it down to a shift in drinking culture: “People don’t just want to go to the bar or pub – they want something to do so they can easily socialise without it centring on drink,” he says. Except there is nothing to do here – it’s a warped corporate nostalgia, a perfect example of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra: a copy of something so distorted from its original context it has no meaning whatsoever.

At first glance, Alcotraz, an immersive bar experience set in a prohibition-era prison, seems in extremely poor taste. I arrive expecting to be thrown headfirst into the controversial, human rights-abusing world of the prison industrial complex.

In fact, what greets me in the east London venue is a wildly successful idea. Run by the production company Inventive, which also developed the immersive wizarding-themed bar Hexmoor, Alcotraz has seven locations in England.

It looks more like a fashionable shopfront than Shawshank. Brutalist concrete walls and sleek iron-clad windows adorn the “holding pen” where customers are given instructions by enthusiastic actors. We put on our orange jumpsuits and are led into our cells, where we promptly meet the bartender – a friendly man who, confusingly, is not part of the 1920s theme but instead asks for allergy information.

Sipping a coconut daiquiri, I start to see why venues where booze is not the only focus are appealing. It’s a mixed crowd – in the cell next to me are a group of women enjoying a school reunion, a mother and son who are here on holiday from the US, and at least two couples on dates. As the somewhat convoluted interactive show begins, featuring a Bible-bashing warden and an inmate attempting escape, we begin to lightly bond through shared fact-finding tasks such as searching for keys to open cells and code words to tell the actors.

Sure, you could simply turn to the table next to yours at the pub and start chatting, but this feels like another, novel way to share the night with strangers. After the four cocktails included in the £51 ticket price, I make my escape, feeling tipsy. I don’t think I’ll be coming back, but I can certainly say I’ve experienced something new. As for poor taste, the Alcotraz website states that it partners with the pro bono legal enterprise Innocence Project London, meaning at least a portion of your ticket price is going towards helping people in actual prison.

Founded in 2016, ball-pit-themed bar Ballie Ballerson is a veteran on the themed bar scene, promising lurid cocktails, bottomless brunches and a mirrored room full of plastic balls. This is the place that has launched a thousand Instagram posts – and countless posts on TikTok.

Before my visit, I have one thought: how do the plastic balls stay clean? On arrival, my fears are assuaged by the fact that the ball pit is only a small corner of a space that otherwise looks like any other low-lit bar. Groups of friends and a table of tourists sip on cocktails like the caprisunha – served in a plastic sack to emulate a Capri-Sun – while speakers blast 00s classics such as Usher’s Yeah!

Ballie’s co-owner, George Armstrong, explains how the venue first opened as a way to capitalise on millennial nostalgia and Instagram-friendly decor, but has recently run into difficulties. “The ball pit is a Trojan horse to get people into the venue, but people are spending less money, so all the bars I know are really struggling,” he says. “Even if we could have later opening hours, we don’t know if anyone would come. It’s no longer fun running a fun business.”

When it’s time to get into the ball pit, though, the fun is surprisingly infectious. Armstrong assures me that it is emptied and cleaned each week by a sanitising machine nicknamed Gobblemuffin – revealing lost items such as phones, keys and even three laptops over the past decade – and food and drink are forbidden. It’s a playful space, he says: “No one can play it cool in a ball pit. So it’s a good shortcut to silliness. We get a lot of gen Zs coming who maybe aren’t as confident socialising, or don’t want to drink as much, so the ball pit eggs them on.”

While this definitely isn’t a gimmick for everyone, for those who might need a push to let loose, you could do far worse than a ball pit.

Part of the country-music-themed franchise that inspired the 2000 film of the same name, the Coyote Ugly Saloon is an international staple with eight venues in Britain alone. On visiting its Camden outpost, I’m expecting raucous bartenders in cowboy hats sliding shots between dancers’ legs as LeAnn Rimes’ Can’t Fight the Moonlight plays. However, at 9pm on a Thursday, I find an alarmingly empty venue populated by a man with purple hair who stands on the bar singing a karaoke version of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights. Next to him a dancer in a bikini top gently sways.

“People want escapism and expertise beyond just a drink,” says Ryan Chetiyawardana, founder of the bar group and consultancy Mr Lyan. “In a more casual space without the engagement of hospitality, venues have tried to fill the experience with activities or immersive theatrics, and they are always looking for the next gimmick. Sometimes that can feel quite hollow.”

As further karaoke enthusiasts take to the bar to wail Adele’s Hello and Sam Smith’s Stay With Me, I certainly begin to feel hollow. The singers seem to be having fun but it’s hard to say what the “saloon” theme or bar dancing is adding to what could otherwise be any karaoke venue. I retreat to a surprisingly spacious garden and ask my friend what she thinks of it. “I’m actually finding it quite sad being here,” she says. We leave shortly after.

I make my way back into the City of London, searching for the Last Judgment pub, which runs a Footsie Fridays event where each drink is dynamically priced according to the stock market. (“Challenge your friends to a bidding war, strategise your orders, and revel in the excitement of a financial rollercoaster!”) Eager to sample this slice of late-capitalist hell, I’m sadly informed that the event isn’t running during the World Cup – pint prices must stay stable for the football fans.

Instead, I make my way to Cahoots, a 1940s-themed brand with three locations in London. I arrive at their Postal Office bar beneath the railway arches near Borough Market, where my friend and I are greeted by a host who informs us it’s now 1946.

Themed cocktails are listed on a newspaper menu, servers are dressed in braces and bow ties, and drinks sealed in little cocktail shakers are whizzed to your table through pneumatic tubes. Sipping on a sweet Josephine Baker and looking at the packed room of couples, I start to see the appeal of the escapism Chetiyawardana mentions: the low-key theme is just enough to provide a topic of conversation and an added bonus to the expense of going out for a drink.

After a week of bar-hopping, I am in dire need of a detox and social hibernation. But the most overwhelming venue of all remains: the bingo-themed bar Hijingo.

The east London branch’s indeterminately Asian-themed entrance bar is rammed with stags, hens and birthday parties all waiting to fill out their number cards and win cash prizes. Inside the bingo hall, which is lined with giant flashing screens, dancers gyrate to club bangers and the prosecco flows as the numbers are called. The decor seems worryingly orientalist and it’s not easy to concentrate on the game while punters are pulled on to the stage for dance-offs, but the energy of the performers is infectious.

At the table next to me, Danielle Shaw is here to celebrate her 25th birthday, and I ask why she chose Hijingo. “It just seemed like something new and fun. Plus, as a larger Black woman, I don’t always feel welcome in pubs,” she says. “A place like this lets us be loud.”

The volume is certainly up, and the crowd is surprisingly diverse. I’m impressed so many punters are opting for bingo, but I’ve learned over this week that while hospitality might be struggling, people still want to go out – they just need to find the right places that can suit their particular needs.

As for me, I’m not sure my ears or my adrenaline could cope with a return visit. Club duvet now awaits.