Time to unleash the big kid in you with our guide to the best adult activities in London.
We’ll be first to admit that we’ve never really grown up. And if things like getting drunk in a ballpark or taking a high-speed boat ride along the Thames doesn’t get you excited anymore, you’re probably getting over the hill.
London’s got a million and one fun activities for big kids like us, but which are the best? And where can you book them? Look no further, we’ve put together this bumper guide of the best activities for adults (big kids) in London.
Fun activities for adults in London
Discover foodie wonders
Citywide
££
Straddling the line between a walking tour and a treasure hunt, but a lot more indulgent than both, Gourmaze will send you off around London to discover some of the city’s best-kept culinary secrets.
Your team will solve riddles and decipher codes that direct you to each eatery. You’re on a time limit to get to each location, so you’ll have to act fast. But no worries, they stop the timer while you eat.
Fancy a fun activity with a bit of light epicureanism? This one’s for you.
Brave the Tomb Raider Live experience
££
Fans of the old Tomb Raider games will get a kick out of this immersive experience based in the big food market in Camden, they’ll have to be ready for a bit of leave-your-judgement-at-the-door type fun, though.
The experience turns you into a student of Croft who, with the help of your trusted friends, is tasked with solving problems to collect relics and help prevent the bad guys from taking over the world.
The journey takes place across a bunch of rooms representing classic levels from Tomb Raider, but in real life translates into something a little more like the Crystal Maze. It’s a right laugh, though, if this sort of thing is up your street.
More information and bookings can be found here.
Get drunk in a ballpark
£
Here’s a bar for anyone who’s really having trouble embracing the seriousness of grown-up life. At Ballie Ballerson you’ll be getting on it in a ballpark. It is one of only three places in London doing proper adult soft play.
They’ve got a fully licensed bar serving nostalgic cocktails and frankly loads of ball pits, with around a million balls in total. The place is a party zone with R&B, disco and house tunes and 2am closes at weekends. Probably one of the most childish activities for adults in London. But there’s nothing wrong with reliving your youth.
Climb a London landmark
££
Adrenaline is the true drug of the big kid, and there’s nothing like getting a dose of it walking across the top of an iconic London landmark to make you feel like the legend we all know you are.
To that end, how about a climb on top of the O2 Arena in Greenwich? You’ll be strapped in but still pretty high up, with some half-decent views of the city around you. Best of all, you can choose a time that suits you, day, twilight or by night.
Get crafty with Tufting London
£££
What we miss most about our childhoods is being able to be creative whenever we wanted. Also fluffy things.
Well, Tufting London combines both into one workshop in Battersea. What’s tufting? This funny word literally just refers to the process of making carpets. And it’s genuinely therapeutic.
The staff pretty much let you loose to create whatever design you want, though they’ll talk you through what you need to get going. All materials are on site, all you need to bring is yourself and your creativity. House goals await.
Perfect your axe throwing
Citywide
££
When we were kids, archery was the medieval activity of choice for birthday parties and office dos. Now it seems all the rage has switched to axe throwing.
There are a couple of venues in London where you can go to find out how much use you’d have been to a barbarian army. Whistle Punks was the UK’s first urban axe throwing venue, an accolade we can’t imagine hearing in the middle ages.
Fancy something without the hipster claims to fame? Axeperience never misses a chance to coin a good pun.
Take a historical pub walking tour of London
Citywide
££
Boozing. In Britain we do it well, and have done for many hundreds of years. London’s got a slew of near-ancient pubs that still serve up the devil’s brew. You can discover a few of them with Liquid History Tours.
Their tours are run by passionate London locals from all walks of life. As their website puts it, your afternoon could be spent with award-winning designers, craft brewers, novelists, stand-up comedians and even the odd rickshaw driver. They’ll take you from pub to pub, expounding knowledge and knocking back pints on a boozy day out where you might just learn a thing or two.
Bust out of a VR escape room
Multiple locations
££
When reality is no longer exciting to you and your big-kid friends, it might be time to don the goggles and enter the metaverse. Down at DNA VR they’ll set you up with a virtual reality that is sadly way more interesting than real life.
Headset on, you’ll have options of games to play together, zombie apocalypse shootouts, Lord-of-the-Rings-style elf town defences, laser tag on steroids, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You can also immerse yourself in a total free-roaming experience, or do an entire escape room challenge in VR.
Smash your mates at crazy golf
Citywide
£
Real adults go swinging. Erm, what did you think we meant? Swinging golf clubs, of course. You don’t have to go the full 18 holes either, London’s got plenty of wacky, and we mean truly out-there, crazy golf courses.
Plonk has locations all round London with courses that resemble scenes out of dystopian gangland flick The Warriors, plus bottomless brunches to set you up for the round. Swingers does things a little differently, modelling its courses on quaint English holiday towns, the boozy element is still there, in the form of some surprisingly good cocktails.
Other honourable mentions go to Puttshack and Birdies, both of whom also do food and aim to ply you with drinks. Spotting a theme here?
Have afternoon tea on a bus
Victoria and Trafalgar Square
££
If you don’t want your activities to turn into boozy mayhem, congratulations on reaching true adulthood, maybe try afternoon tea on a tour bus instead.
Brigit’s set off from Victoria Coach Station and Trafalgar Square at regular intervals throughout the day. You’ll spend a couple of hours (depending on traffic) cruising past London’s sights and eating from their charming menu of sweets and savouries, all washed down with cups of tea or coffee. There’s always the wine list too, if you’ve not quite got a handle on your self-control yet.
How to go: Book directly with Brigit’s Bakery.
Take a high-speed boat ride on the Thames
Tower Bridge
££
Don your lifejacket, dig out some waterproofs, ditch the sunhats, and go racing along the Thames at breakneck speeds. We’ve all stood by the river and seen them go by, and most of us have thought it looks pretty fun.
Thames Rockets will take you and your crew up and down the river, where you can glimpse the sights sliding by, and flip the fingers at the losers who decided to take the Uber boat that day. You’re royalty of the river and you don’t care who knows it.
How to go: Book directly with Thames Rockets.
Play ping pong with cocktails
Farringdon and Old Street
£
Not just a sport we play on a dusty table in a mate’s garage, ping pong can actually be quite a classy affair. Who knew.
At Bounce you can take to the table with a cocktail in hand, smash your mates in a round robin, maybe put a little money down, win, and do it all before tucking into a pizza and snacks hot from the oven. Of course, these guys are no chumps, they also know their way around beer pong.
Try indoor skydiving
Greenwich
£££
Probably the best fun adult activity London has to offer, iFly is the city’s first indoor skydiving experience. You’ll get into one of those giant tubes and have the feeling of hurtling towards earth with only a thin piece of fabric and a pull string to save you from certain death.
You can even do the jump in VR, watching computer-generated environments whiz past as you glide about, and the team can photograph your experience so you’ll never forget it. Nothing bonds a group together like a bunch of hilarious images of your faces blown out of shape by industrial winds.
Worth knowing: Flipper’s roller disco, previously featured in this spot, closed for good in October 2024. We haven’t found a genuine like-for-like replacement worth recommending in its place, so we’ve removed the entry rather than point you somewhere that’s shut.
Have a shootout in a nuclear bunker
Woolwich
££
Fancy hitting a genuine Cold War-era bunker for some competitive team-based shootouts?
At Bunker 51 you can choose between paintball, laser tag and airsoft and stick yourself on the team against that friend you’ve always secretly wanted to pop off a few shots at. All of this takes place in the most atmospheric of war zones, an abandoned Cold War nuclear bunker. As battlegrounds go, you can’t get better than that.
Hit Skylight
Tobacco Dock
£
Organising a group of people to come to one afternoon get-together can often feel like an insurmountable task in London. You’ve got that one person who doesn’t want to drink, another with a peculiar dietary requirement, and then there’s always the friend who never leaves whatever godforsaken zone they live in.
Skylight is a happy medium, and a pretty good one at that. You’ll find a bunch of games, and during winter, ice skating, there’s food to suit everyone’s needs, and of course the oil for the cogs of social harmony: alcohol.
Break into Alcotraz
Shoreditch
££
Fancy an immersive cocktail experience with a twist? Alcotraz is our go-to. You’ll be put in an orange jumpsuit and behind the bars of America’s most notorious prison.
Once there, you’ll have to help corrupt guards and prisoners alike smuggle booze through the prison to get your hands on that much-needed drink, in this case, artisanal cocktails made by professional bartenders. Just don’t let the warden catch you.
Play board games at Draughts
£
The more mature (read: less keen to combine some kind of children’s activity with booze) might prefer an afternoon taking it easy on the beer and rolling some dice at Draughts.
They’re a regular old cafe with stacks and stacks of board games, well over 1,000 titles across their locations. You can pull what you want off the shelf, find yourself a nice quiet table and while away the hours at a calm round of whatever takes your fancy. Draughts has properly expanded since we first wrote this up too, alongside the original Dalston site, there’s now a Waterloo branch under the railway arches on Leake Street, and a big new spot in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford.
Though we know that’s not always how it goes down. If you see a group with a few too many empty glasses at their table, threatening murder over a game of Catan, come over and say hi. We’d love to meet you.
Hit an OTT bingo hall
Hoxton
££
It’s the 21st century. Bingo is no longer for the saggy-armed or over the hill, it can now incorporate buzzwords like “immersive” and “multi-sensory”. Welcome to Hijingo, London’s over-the-top bingo hall.
Picture flashing neon, a bingo caller screaming over the crowds to get the numbers heard, and alcohol in free flow. Throw in the occasional themed night where actors simulate system breakdowns and scenes from dystopian futures. That should give you some idea of what this place is like. Don’t bring your granny, it might just give her a heart attack.
Become a Monopoly piece
Tottenham Court Road
££
If the regular-sized board games at Draughts don’t do it for you, why not replace the little top hat or dog with a human-sized piece? At Monopoly Lifesized you’ll take to the board to buy up property around our fair city.
This enlarged version features games rooms you compete in to buy property, with all the regular angst and screwing over of the opposition that the normal-sized game has, but played over a 15m x 15m board.
Get tipsy and learn to paint
Citywide
££
For the more creatively minded, why not combine a bit of artistic work with some light drinking. At Brush and Bubbles, you’ll learn the skills to paint a picture while sipping on something fizzy to get the creative juices flowing.
People of all skill levels are welcome, with painting instructors on hand to guide you through the basics. And you don’t have to drink either, they have non-alcoholic options too. But who’s ever heard of a teetotal artist?
The London x London Take: iFly and Alcotraz are the two we’d send a group to first, one’s genuinely thrilling, the other’s genuinely fun, and both deliver more than the novelty-factor activities elsewhere on this list. Everything else here is a great add-on to a day already built around one of those two.
Practical tips
- Booking online with the company is always the most straightforward way to get stuck into these things.
- If you’ve made your way through this list and you’re looking for more adult activities, check sites like Eventbrite and DesignMyNight. They usually have a good section devoted to things like this.
