Artisan Darts at Flight Club

DARTS will never be quite the same again. Remember the last time you played darts? I’ll bet it was nothing like the way they play darts these days in uber-trendy corners of London.

We went to the new Flight Club just around the corner from Victoria Station for an evening of what they now call ‘social darts’.

Bright and exuberant young things from the city gather there to throw their arrows, but not quite the way you remember. These darts players clutch cocktails and pitchers. The young men in check shirts sport bushy beards but wear no socks.

Flight Club is a new thing, and there are Flight Clubs in Shoreditch, Bloomsbury and Victoria, in Manchester and in Chicago.

They are lavishly decorated spaces with different ‘themes’ in different areas. Our oche was in the Toy Room, where chintzy pottery figures lined the walls and stuffed toy animals hung from the ceiling. A thoroughly agreeable soundtrack of funk and soul thumped out from the speakers.

To play at Flight Club, you book a darts board area for a certain number of people at a certain time, just like in a bowling alley, and an army of ever-cheerful young staff wait on you constantly, bringing food and drink to your area whenever you press a little button and command it.

The computer randomly splits you into pairings and you play various darts-related games over your 90 minutes – a conventional shoot-out down from 180 rather than the more time-consuming and troublesome 501, a game of ‘Killer’, ‘Shanghai’, ‘Snakes and Ladders’ or other clever concoctions.

At the end of the 90 minutes a winner emerges, in our case a jubilant Mrs H, who topped the leaderboard, had her picture taken with it and has talked of little else since. I was woefully far down the rankings, and frankly don’t want to talk about that at all.

All around us, hundreds of young players in workplace or family groups played loud and long into the night in the Toy Room, the Big Dipper or the Shooting Gallery, quaffing craft beer and nibbling artisan pizza as the screens alongside their dart boards kept the scores and showed video replays of their finest moments. The videos arrive in your inbox by email the next morning so you can share them on social media.

I sound sniffy, but I don’t mean to. Traditional pubs with dartboards are to be treasured, but you don’t find enough of them. Few landlords can afford the room for darts when they can squeeze in an extra table for carvery, and who can blame them? And who wants an errant arrow penetrating the crust of their Yorkshire Pudding as they sit down to enjoy a pleasant pub lunch?

The sport of darts is thriving at the top level, and there is even talk of having it included in the Olympics. Why not? Is it so different from shooting?

Flight Club keeps the sport of darts alive in surroundings where you just wouldn’t expect to find it, and for that reason it has to be a good thing. Maybe the next Michael Van Gerwen or Robbie Cross will come through from a Flight Club, having been inspired to play the game by an evening of craft beer and artisan pizza in Shoreditch. Wouldn’t that be a wonderment?