It’s mid-afternoon on a Thursday and the projectiles are soaring at Flight Club, a chain of swish inner-city bars that brands itself as “the home of Social Darts”. The fact that darts has a new base will come as a surprise to many pubgoers, especially when they learn that an hour’s session for two players is £15 – off-peak.

But Flight Club is a million miles from the game of community taverns and the jargon of Bullseye.

Here, the boards are electronic. All the score-keeping is done for you, as with bowling. Hit a button, and staff bring more drinks. A screen overhead takes your picture and turns it into an avatar, and the next day you are sent a link to your “Flight Club Story”: a montage of action replays, neatly bundled and ready for upload to your Facebook feed.

Darts in Stoke has something that London doesn’t – a sense of craft, of community Mark Ball

It is the glossy, hi-tech reboot of a game deemed to be dying as long as a decade ago. In 2007 the bookmakers Blue Square, which organised the Save Our Darts campaign, found that just one in 10 Britons had played pub darts in the previous 12 months, down from one in four five years earlier.

The rumoured return of Bullseye to television and the professional league parties aside, darts as a pub game is still on the decline today. The same factors apply as in 2007, though metrics are harder to come by. The cost of floor space in inner cities has squeezed traditional pubs hard. The dartboard is usually the second casualty, after the pool table.

Jocky Wilson and Jim Bowen on ITV’s Bullseye in 1984. The show is rumoured to be set for a return



Yet Flight Club represents a small demographic pocket in which the trend is reversing. It opened its first venue in Shoreditch, London, in October 2015; it has since expanded to Bloomsbury, with plans under way for its first venue in Manchester’s Ship Canal House, and another in Chicago.

It is hard to know what the likes of darts champion Phil “The Power” Taylor, who began life as a sheet metal worker before moving on to making ceramic toilet roll holders, would make of Flight Club. But Mark Ball has a few ideas.

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Ball is researching a PhD at Leeds University in the traditional experience of darts, and has based himself in Stoke-on-Trent – Taylor’s home town and the last redoubt of the British scene. In Stoke, you can still play darts seven nights a week, and many do. The pub Ball plays in hosts two men’s teams, three women’s teams, and three dartboards – “And it’s a small pub,” he says.

The city’s passion for the game is obvious; the reasons for it, less so. Some think it is because of Taylor’s mentor and 70s legend Eric Bristow, who moved there from London, says Ball. “Others point to the fact that, well, there’s just not a lot to do.”

We meet at Flight Club’s Shoreditch venue, which is kitted out with grandfather clocks, bankers’ lamps, Chinese vases, and other faux-Edwardian decorations now typical of a certain kind of Time Out-friendly London venue. Around us, young City types in suits and pink shirts drink lager and lob arrows.

Darts in the 1940s



Ball and I play a game of 301 – rebranded by Flight Club as “Demolition” – and an around-the-clock game called Shanghai in which hitting the same spot on the board three times summons an animated ninja on the electronic scoreboard above. He thrashes me.

Ball took up the sport only after deciding to set his doctorate (on the relationship between “leisure, meaning and a sense of place”) in the dense and storied world of the Stoke darts scene.

Demographically, Stoke is said to be the most working-class city in Britain, with 37% of residents performing “routine work”. It is famed for its community spirit and for getting on with it, often in the face of adversity. With the city in fact a federation of six smaller towns, its urban sprawl allows for a dense patchwork of pubs, rather than a few big bars downtown. Rents are also very low.



It is easy to see how the game of darts might strike near the heart of such a place. Some of the locals Ball has met have been playing for 50 years. No wonder it took him weeks of lunchtime practice in the university canteen before he felt ready to join a team there himself.

Men throw darts and drink beer at a pub in Porlock, Somerset



Flight Club, he says, is a different proposition entirely. It offers a number of packages: corporate teambuilding for groups of up to 400 people, boozy “brunch social” weekends, even speed-dating. The social bit is predominant, Ball argues, with darts more the instrument of a business model.



“Places like this feed a need for a certain kind of accessible urban experience – Tinder dates, basically, and work dos,” he says. The formula is “cocktails, plus wood-fired pizza, plus X” – where X is a game dredged up from the youth club or rec room and transformed to fit the urban experience economy. “I’d say the thing that really got me thinking along those lines was when I heard there was a curling bar in London last winter.”



Be it hipster bowling places like Brooklyn Bowl or hipster table tennis places like Bounce, they serve the same purpose: an accessible, structured interaction with a novelty element – perfect for that first date or corporate event.



The party atmosphere at the BDO World Darts Championships 2018 at Lakeside

“It helps if the game is quite short – you need turnover to make it profitable. You can have it explained for you and made slick, so you can dash in and out,” says Ball. “I’d be interested to know how many people [Flight Club] have coming in on a regular basis.”

These “adult playgrounds”, as Ball calls them, are as much a reflection of market forces as the struggling pub landlord stocking up on goats cheese tartlets from Brakes’ gastropub range. The price-per-square foot of retail space in London means a cheap evening’s entertainment is now largely the preserve of churchgoers and park drinkers. Standing around costs money – the Flight Club model works well because it effectively charges a ground rent to patrons.

“It fits a logic of urban development,” says Ball with a shrug. “The one informed by the logic of accumulation and abundance that says that more is more, and that the old must make way for the new.”

An ‘adult playground”: social darts at Flight Club in Shoreditch

“It’s not necessarily that darts is being priced out of the market,” a Flight Club representative argues. “Rather, people are now going out less often so are looking for something different when they do. They want unique, memorable experiences they can share with friends, family or colleagues.”

As for the distinction between darts and “Social Darts”, Flight Club say that they’ve taken the traditional game of darts and “supercharged” it: “We’ve developed a range of fast and exciting multiplayer games ... Our guests pay to play in large groups and for the spaces that best suit their requirements, rather than for the dartboards themselves.”

Ball is keen to clarify that he doesn’t have anything against the brand in particular. “In fact, I think it could be a really positive thing – a gateway to making darts accessible to people who might be intimidated by a locals’ pub.”



But he says “[darts in] Stoke has something that London doesn’t – a sense of craft, of community – that isn’t really represented here”.

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It’s true that darts and other leisure activities are anchored in stable, close-knit communities, which are increasingly rare in the major metropoles – but they also create them.

“I’ve made so many friends playing darts,” says Ball. “I can go in there, have a half [pint] for two pounds and get immersed in a game of darts, get lost in it, for an hour. And I think increasingly we all need a space to get lost in. You can’t buy that.”

He waves a hand at the studded leather panelling, strings of filament bulbs, and animated ninjas. “If this is our vision of leisure in the 21st century – people coming in for an hour, not engaging with the craft – then I think we’re losing something.”

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