A New Role For Britain’s High Streets

Beautiful! Cute! Now kill each other,” orders the instructor as a couple face off, axes aloft, for the post-date photoshoot after a night on the town throwing hatchets. The choice of unusual options for a London date is vast these days—battling a zombie apocalypse in Greenwich, escaping a haunted Pirate Ship on the Holloway Road and tossing tomahawks with friends in Vauxhall. Competitive socializing, as this trend is known, sounds like a social-media peer-pressure nightmare, but loosely translates as doing an activity with your friends. It ranges from the traditional (go-karting, crazy golf, and ping-pong) to the futuristic (virtual-reality Everest climbing and ai-led murder mysteries). It is being cautiously embraced as a lifeline by high-street landlords ravaged by e-commerce. Read more at The Economist.