Putney’s nightclub Le Fez has applied to tear out its booth seating and install eight electronic darts lanes. The plans for 200 Upper Richmond Road reflects a bigger shift in what a night out now looks like.
They also include a new food offer: reheated pizza. The late nights stay (Le Fez still runs until 4am on Fridays and Saturdays), but the venue wants something it doesn’t have: earlier evenings, group bookings, birthday parties, tables of people who want to throw darts and eat pizza before the club opens.
The industry calls this “competitive socialising”: venues where a game is the draw, not just a backdrop to drinking. And it has been growing fast. Around 400 UK nightclubs have closed since 2020, roughly a third of the pre-pandemic total. Rekom UK, the company behind Pryzm and Atik, filed for bankruptcy in 2024 and shut 17 venues. Pryzm Kingston, a few stops up the District line, closed last summer. The big nightclub chains are not recovering.
What is replacing them, according to an analysis published this year, are venues built around doing something rather than just drinking somewhere. The number of competitive socialising sites has grown 84% since 2018. Almost half of British adults say they have visited one in the past year, according to Mintel.
Darts is the biggest winner. Luke Littler won the PDC World Championship in 2025 at 17, bringing a generation of younger fans to a game they had thought belonged to their grandfathers. E-darts (electronic boards with automatic scoring and multiple game modes) made it easy to pick up and simple to book. Flight Club already runs four London venues open until 1am on weekends. The model is straightforward: book a lane, drink, stay longer than you meant to.
Le Fez is not turning into a darts bar. Eight lanes inside an existing nightclub open until 4am is something different: an early-evening offer bolted on to the late-night one. The changes in the application are specific: a partition across the bar, a new service area, the booth seating replaced by the lanes. The application is handled by Woods Whur, a specialist licensing firm in Leeds.
Have your say
Anyone can object to or support the application before 17 July 2026. Write to the Wandsworth licensing team (handled by Merton Council under a joint arrangement) at licensing@merton.gov.uk. The full application is at wandsworth.gov.uk.
Eclectic Bars Trading Limited, which owns Le Fez, is part of the Brighton Pier Group, which left the stock market in May 2025 and re-registered as a private company.
