Things to Do in London with Friends: Top 15 Ideas for an Unforgettable Night Out (2026)

London is, objectively, one of the best cities in the world for a night out with friends. The problem is not a shortage of options – it is the opposite. The sheer volume of things available means that most groups default to the same pub or the same restaurant they have been going to for years, not because it is the best choice but because it requires the least negotiation. The decision paralysis is real, and the default always wins.

This list is designed to break that default. Fifteen genuinely good options for a night out with friends in London, chosen on one criterion: they create something between the people who do them – a shared memory, a new in-joke, a moment that would not have happened anywhere else. For the opener that gets any group talking within minutes, a session in a private karaoke room at BAM Karaoke Box Victoria is the strongest recommendation on this list. For specific occasions within the group, our guides on hen parties in London and afterwork activities in London will give you more targeted options.

1. BAM Karaoke Box Victoria – the one that always works

There is a reason BAM Karaoke Box tops this list, and it is not just that private karaoke is a good time. It is that it is the activity most reliably capable of turning a group of people – however well they already know each other – into something closer and more alive than they were when they walked in. The mechanism is simple: singing in front of other people requires a specific kind of vulnerability, and when everyone in the room does it together, that shared vulnerability becomes shared trust.

BAM is located at 74 Victoria Street in the Zig Zag Building – Europe’s largest karaoke venue, 10,000 square feet across three floors, with 22 individually designed private rooms. Your room is completely yours for the duration of the session. No strangers, no audience, no pressure to perform for anyone who did not choose to be there. The bar menu – cocktails, sharing plates and snacks from the kitchen by culinary director Sabrina Gidda – is ordered on a touchscreen tablet inside the room, so nothing interrupts the session. The catalogue runs to 45,000 songs across every genre, decade and language. Rooms hold from 4 to 35 guests. The venue is licensed until 1:30am.

What happens in a BAM room is the same every time: someone turns out to be extraordinary at something no one expected. Someone else attempts something wildly ambitious and fails in a way that makes them the hero of the evening. By the third song the whole group is singing together without having decided to, arms around shoulders, completely unselfconscious. Those moments – unplanned, specific, impossible to manufacture – are the ones people are still referencing months later.

2. Axe throwing – the activity that upends expectations

Axe throwing works for groups of friends because it does something that very few activities manage: it distributes the moments of brilliance in a way that does not match any pre-existing social hierarchy. The person everyone assumed would be terrible is often the one hitting the bullseye by the end of the second round. The person who arrived most confidently is often the one needing the most coaching. These small reversals produce exactly the kind of delighted surprise that makes a group of friends feel alive in each other’s company.

London has several dedicated venues now, most with an industrial aesthetic, craft beers on tap, and tournament formats that keep the competitive energy up from the first throw to the last. Trained coaches teach the technique in under an hour – no strength or prior experience needed – and the whole session, including the mini-tournament, runs for about two hours. Easy to organise, surprisingly absorbing, and consistently excellent for groups of 8 to 20.

3. A comedy night at a proper club

Laughing at the same things at the same time is one of the most efficient social bonding mechanisms available to a group of humans, and London’s comedy scene gives you access to genuinely world-class material at prices that embarrass comparable entertainment options. The Comedy Store on Oxendon Street, the Soho Theatre on Dean Street, and the Angel Comedy Club in Islington all run excellent programming throughout the week, with acts whose calibre consistently surprises audiences who were expecting something more modest.

The right approach: trust the venue’s curation rather than chasing a name you already know. Book as a group, arrive early enough to sit together, and let the shared experience do the rest. The conversations afterwards – the bits that landed, the moments no one expected, the things that will come up again in completely unrelated contexts six months from now – are part of what you are paying for.

4. An escape room

The escape room is the activity that most directly tests how a group of friends actually works together when there is time pressure and a shared goal. In sixty minutes of puzzle-solving, you discover things about people you have known for years: who stays calm when the clock is ticking, who has a lateral-thinking instinct that never comes up in normal conversation, who leads and who defers and whether those roles shift as the mission develops. These discoveries, made in a completely low-stakes environment, are consistently more interesting than anything a dinner conversation produces.

London’s escape room offering is genuinely excellent. The best venues have moved far beyond the padlocks-on-a-box format into full theatrical productions with actors, elaborate set design, and narratives that hold together throughout. For groups of 8 to 20, the format with parallel rooms competing simultaneously is the most satisfying.

5. Bottomless brunch

The bottomless brunch has become such a standard feature of London social life that it risks feeling unremarkable – until you are in the middle of a good one, at which point it becomes apparent why the format has been so durable. A fixed time, a shared table, unlimited drinks, and a menu that is festive without being too heavy: it is the combination that gets a group of friends from wherever they all are at the start of an afternoon to fully operational sociability in about forty-five minutes.

The quality of London’s bottomless brunch offering has improved significantly in the last few years. The best venues now include entertainment – live singers, drag performers, DJ sets – and cocktail menus that go significantly beyond the house prosecco formula that defined the format a decade ago. Soho, Shoreditch and Covent Garden have the highest concentration of quality options; book well in advance for weekend slots.

6. A boat on the Thames at sunset

Hiring a small boat for the sunset hour on the Thames is the activity that most efficiently conveys the message that this is not an ordinary evening. The City skyline from the water, Tower Bridge appearing and disappearing as the boat moves, the sun going down over the west of the city while the eastern towers illuminate: it is a version of London that even people who have lived here for years have rarely seen, and it produces a specific quality of attention that bars and restaurants simply cannot replicate.

Private boat hire on the Thames is available for groups from 10 to 50 guests, with caterers and mobile bars arrangeable in advance. The ideal timing is the hour either side of sunset – May to September. It costs less than most people assume and produces consistently better memories than its price point suggests it should.

7. A rooftop bar at golden hour

London has some of the finest rooftop views of any city in Europe, and the hour before sunset is when they are at their best. The light on the buildings, the landmarks that appear and disappear as the angle changes, the slow transition from afternoon to evening: it is a visual event worth organising an evening around. Several London venues offer group reservations on their rooftops with cocktails, sharing plates and a dedicated server.

The timing is everything. Arrive one hour before sunset – check the precise time for the evening in question – and stay for thirty minutes of darkness. The window of golden light and the first illuminations that follow it is what you are there for, and no number of cocktails compensates for arriving too late to see it.

8. Darts bar

The premium darts bars that have opened across London in the last few years have created an excellent medium-energy format for a group of friends who want something structured and competitive without the physical commitment of karting or the intensity of axe throwing. Booked lanes with electronic scoring, cocktails, bar snacks, and a tournament format that everyone can follow from the first throw: it is accessible, genuinely fun, and consistently generates the kind of competitive banter that makes a group of friends feel like themselves at their best.

Shoreditch, the City and King’s Cross have the best concentration of quality venues. Group packages typically include reserved lanes, a welcome round, and tournament formats that run across a full evening.

9. A food market evening

London’s food markets at their best are one of the finest versions of the city’s social life: the freedom to eat whatever you want, in whatever combination, from wherever you choose, at whatever pace the evening demands. Borough Market on select evening openings, Maltby Street Market in Bermondsey, and the various seasonal night market formats in Shoreditch and Brixton allow a group of friends with very different appetites to eat brilliantly without the constraint of a shared menu or a table that needs to be vacated.

The format is particularly well-suited to larger groups where coordinating everyone’s dietary preferences around a restaurant booking has historically been difficult. A food market gives everyone agency and produces more variety and more conversation than a set menu ever manages.

10. A night walk through London

Sometimes the simplest option is the best one. London on foot at night – the illuminated facades of the South Bank, the lights on the bridges, the quiet streets of Bloomsbury or Islington that feel completely different after dark, the Tower of London seen without tourists, the Barbican complex that becomes a brutalist monument when lit from below – is a genuinely beautiful city to walk through, and it costs nothing except the willingness to be outside rather than inside.

A planned walk with a specific route – say, from Waterloo Bridge to Tower Bridge along the South Bank, or from Shoreditch through Clerkenwell to the City – gives the evening a structure without being prescriptive. Combine it with a stop at a pub or bar somewhere along the route and you have the most satisfying low-cost evening London offers.

11. A bowling and arcade evening

The newer generation of bowling venues in London has nothing to do with the sticky-carpeted format of the 1990s. Neon lighting, automatic scoring, cocktail bars, and arcade floors with air hockey, retro machines, and basketball hoops: it is a self-contained evening that gives everyone something to do, at whatever energy level they arrive with, and that scales gracefully from a group of 8 to a group of 30.

The best London bowling venues are in Shoreditch, King’s Cross and Farringdon, each with excellent options for dinner before or cocktails after. The competitive element – however relaxed – consistently produces the evening’s funniest moments, usually involving someone who claimed they were good at bowling and has had to revise that assessment publicly.

12. A guided whisky or gin tasting

For groups that appreciate a more considered approach to drinking, a guided tasting session with a knowledgeable host – single malt whisky, craft gin, rum, or a comparative wine tasting – is one of the most instructive and sociable evenings London offers. An expert leads the group through six to eight expressions, explains the production process and regional differences, and runs a blind tasting where the results are consistently humbling for anyone who arrived with strong opinions about what they know.

The evening works for groups of 6 to 16 and runs for about 90 minutes. It is the format that most reliably produces genuine conversation about something outside the usual range of topics – which is, arguably, the main thing a good night out with friends should do.

13. A jazz or live music evening

London’s live music infrastructure is unmatched in Europe: from the O2 and the Royal Albert Hall to fifty-seat jazz rooms in Soho basements and converted railway arches in Hackney where the best undiscovered music in the country is playing on a Thursday evening. The intimacy of a small live music venue – where the sound is in the room with you rather than at a distance, where you can see the musicians listening to each other, where the atmosphere is specific to that night rather than replicated across a chain – is something that a playlist or a streaming service fundamentally cannot reproduce.

For a group of friends with shared musical interests, building the evening around a specific gig or residency gives it a focus that a bar crawl or a restaurant booking rarely provides.

14. An afternoon tea

Afternoon tea at one of London’s celebrated hotels or tea rooms is one of those experiences that transcends whatever group dynamics it is applied to. It works for every age, every combination of people, every occasion from birthday celebrations to catching up with friends who have not been in the same room for months. Three tiers of sandwiches, scones with clotted cream, and miniature pastries, accompanied by excellent tea and the option of champagne: it is one of those experiences that is simply better than the sum of its parts, and consistently more enjoyable than any comparable investment of time and money elsewhere.

15. The complete evening: BAM + dinner in Victoria

For any group that wants a structured evening without complicated logistics, the combination of a session at BAM Karaoke Box Victoria followed by dinner in the surrounding neighbourhood is the cleanest and most satisfying format on this list. BAM handles the opening act: within ninety minutes the group has shared something specific, created references it did not have before, and arrived at a state of warmth and openness that dinner alone would have taken the whole evening to reach. Dinner handles the second act: time to consolidate what was created, to talk properly, to move into the rest of the night in exactly the right mood.

Victoria is a better dinner neighbourhood than its reputation suggests, and the practical advantage of Victoria Station – one of London’s most connected transport hubs – means that guests coming from different parts of the city, or from outside London entirely, can get home without drama at the end of the night.