Everybody says London is a hard city to make friends in. What nobody says is that the problem is not the city, it is that most of us are waiting to be invited to something.
The good news is that London is stuffed with things you can simply turn up to, where turning up alone is the entire point and nobody will ask why you came on your own. Some of them are free. Some of them will have you running 8km through the City on a Tuesday night with 80 strangers and a portable speaker.
Here is where to actually go, what it costs, and the bit that catches people out.
How to make friends in London
Join a run club and just turn up
This is the single biggest change in how Londoners meet each other, and it costs nothing. Run Dem Crew meets outside lululemon at 1 Horner Square in Old Spitalfields Market on Tuesdays, gathering from 6.30pm and setting off around 6.45pm for a conversational 5k. No booking, no membership, no form. You show up and run.
Track Mafia is Thursdays, 6.30pm to 8.30pm at Paddington Recreation Ground in W9. Midnight Runners is the loud one, a bootcamp run with music and exercise stops, and you join through the Heylo app rather than their website. Fair warning on that one: you need to be able to run 5km comfortably before you rock up, and the pace sits between four and six minutes a kilometre.
If none of that sounds like you, parkrun is free, 9am every Saturday, and happens in dozens of London parks. Register once, then print or save your barcode, because no barcode means no time and a volunteer having to break it to you.
Sign up for a sports league on your own
You do not need a team. GO Mammoth exists precisely for people who do not have one, and says more than 70% of its players join without knowing anybody, then get placed with others at the same level. Netball, football, volleyball, dodgeball, spread across Balham, Battersea Park, Clapham, Fulham and Victoria, from around £7 a player a week over an eight to twelve week season.
The season structure is what makes it work. You see the same faces every week for three months, roughly how long it takes for a group of strangers to become people who message each other. A one-off class does not do that.
Social Hustle runs basketball, football and kickball on the same principle and books a pub for afterwards as part of the deal, which tells you where their priorities are. Their sign-up is by email rather than a booking page, so you will have to actually ask.
Join a theatre club
London is full of people who want to see more theatre and have nobody to go with. Up in the Cheap Seats has been solving that for fourteen years and has run close to 3,000 events. It costs £3.50 to join, once, forever. The group meets in the theatre bar about half an hour before curtain, regroups at the interval and goes for a drink afterwards, and you buy your own ticket. One rule catches people out: your application gets rejected without a clear photo of your face.
London Cinema and Theatre Meetup is the big one at over 7,000 members, and the organiser block-books so you often pay less than walking up.
If you are under 30, Young Barbican is the best deal in the city: free to join, £6 tickets, and you can bring a friend at the same price. It runs monthly events rather than just flogging cheap seats. Shakespeare’s Globe does £5 standing tickets with no age limit at all. There is more of that in our London theatre guide.
Go out dancing on your own, on purpose
London Solo Ravers is a Meetup group of around 1,400 people whose entire premise is wanting to go to an event and having nobody to go with. It is free, there is a WhatsApp group attached, and you have to make your display name and picture public before you are let in, a sensible bit of friction.
The other thing that has taken over London is the coffee rave: 7am, sober, an hour of dancing and a flat white, then work. Rant & Ramble run theirs in the City and tickets start at nothing. It sounds unhinged and it is, but a 7am dancefloor is a considerably easier place to talk to someone than a 1am one.
For queer nightlife, Body Movements in Southwark Park is the big annual one and sells out well in advance, so set a reminder rather than a plan. Otherwise start at Dalston Superstore. Our pick of London’s nightclubs has the rest.
Have dinner with five strangers
Timeleft seats you with five people you have never met, every Wednesday at 7pm, in a restaurant you are only told about on the day. You fill in a personality questionnaire in the app, book, and turn up. You pay the restaurant for what you eat. It is the closest thing London has to a machine for meeting people, and the Wednesday-night regularity is the clever part.
Supper clubs do a gentler version of the same trick, because you are at a long shared table and the food gives everyone something to talk about. Uyen Luu runs hers from a Hackney studio at £60 for eight courses, and Mexican Food Memories is £69, three hours, BYOB, at Karla Zazueta’s place in north London. Both book up. We have rounded up more of London’s supper clubs here.
Use the apps that are actually built for friendship
Get the name right or you will be looking for something that no longer exists: friendship is no longer a mode inside Bumble. It is a separate app called Bumble For Friends, it is free, and it works the way you would expect, swiping through profiles of people who are also explicitly there to make mates rather than to be charmed.
Peanut started as an app for finding other new mums and has widened out across fertility, pregnancy, motherhood and menopause, so it is now less about playdates and more about finding women in the same specific bit of life as you.
The honest caveat on all of them: the app is the easy part. Two people can message for three weeks and never fix a date. Suggest something concrete within the first few exchanges or it dies quietly, exactly like the group chat you were in last year.
Meetup is still the most underused thing in London
Think of Meetup as a noticeboard for social outings. There are groups for everything: craft workshops, salsa, hiking, women-only picnics, coffee mornings, board games. The ones that work are the weekly ones, because you are building a habit rather than attending an event.
London Social Hiking runs through it, more than 14,000 members strong, with coach trips out to the Jurassic Coast, Cheddar Gorge and the Brecon Beacons. Beginners genuinely are welcome. If you would rather stay closer to home, the walks near London you can reach on a train ticket are worth a look.
One thing to know: joining and attending free events is free, but Meetup now takes a service fee on ticketed events and some groups charge their own dues, so read the listing before you turn up expecting nothing to leave your account. And if nothing there appeals, host your own. Pick a park, write a listing, wait for the RSVPs.
Find your people on Reddit
r/LondonSocialClub has around 227,000 members and, unlike most of the internet, it converts into actual pubs on actual evenings. Posts get flagged as going ahead or happening today, and the tone is closer to a group chat than a forum. r/london is far bigger at about 1.6 million but is mostly news, moaning and rent.
Instagram still works for finding what is on, but one bit of received wisdom is out of date: you can no longer follow a hashtag, that was switched off at the end of 2024. Searching one still works fine, and a polite DM to someone organising something is still one of the more effective things you can do.
Take a class, not a three-year course
The point of a class is that it gives you a reason to talk to someone and something to talk about, which are the two things a pub full of strangers does not. School of Wok in Covent Garden is £115 for a three-hour evening class and £195 for a full day, and you cook alongside the same handful of people all evening. Leiths in Shepherd’s Bush runs one-day masterclasses from about £175, knife skills included, lunch thrown in.
For something you can book on a whim, ClassBento is where London’s class listings live now. Beginners calligraphy runs about £35 to £66 depending on where you do it, and there are pizza-making classes in Hackney and Wandsworth for £42 to £80.
If you want a proper language class rather than an app, UCL’s Centre for Languages runs evening courses that are open to anyone, ten weeks, two hours an evening. They are £475 a term for the general public, so treat that as a commitment rather than a punt. For actual language exchange with a human, Tandem and HelloTalk are the ones people use. More ideas in our round-up of London cooking classes.
Join a book club that does not make you read the book
London Silent Book Club is almost 6,000 people and works like this: everyone turns up with whatever they are already reading, there is a short round of introductions, then an hour of companionable silence, then a drink. No assigned reading, no homework, no being put on the spot about themes. For anyone who finds small talk exhausting, it is close to perfect, because the socialising is optional and comes after the bit that is not.
If you want the opposite, Rebel Book Club meets on the last Tuesday of the month, does non-fiction only, and members vote on the title from a shortlist. It runs about £17 a month and describes itself as part cocktail social, part classroom, an accurate description that will tell you immediately whether it is for you.
Volunteer, and get a workout out of it
GoodGym is the clever one. You run, walk or cycle as a group to do a physical task for a community project or an older neighbour, then head home. There is no charge, just an optional £7 a month if you want to chip in, and it operates in more than thirty London boroughs. You get exercise, a purpose and a group: three problems solved by one Tuesday evening.
Check your own borough page before committing, because activity varies enormously between them and a few have gone quiet. Prefer soil under your fingernails? Fulham Palace takes volunteers in its walled garden, and most of London’s parks and city farms run something similar.
Take a guided walk
A guided walk removes the hardest bit, which is having to start the conversation, because the guide does it for you and everybody is pointed at the same thing. Plenty of people come alone. Two hours later you have all been rained on together, and that is its own kind of bond.
Our Shoreditch street art tour is a genuinely free one and covers ground most tours skip, and the Harry Potter walking tour is the one to take someone on who will not shut up about being a Ravenclaw. To do it without a guide at all, our pick of the best walks in London has routes you can follow yourself, which works just as well if you drag somebody along.
Pick a local and keep going back
This is the oldest method and it still works, but only if you do the unglamorous part: the same pub, repeatedly, ideally at the same sort of time. One visit to a beautiful old boozer gets you a nice pint. Eight visits gets you recognised, and being recognised is the whole thing.
Sit at the bar rather than at a table, because a table is a fortress. Go on a weeknight, when it is quiet enough that talking is possible. And pick somewhere small: the enormous refurbished ones are lovely and you will remain anonymous in them forever. Our guide to London’s oldest pubs is a decent place to start looking, though the right one for this is almost certainly within ten minutes of your front door.
Find the community that is already yours
Some of the best of London’s social life runs on communities built around who people actually are, and they are far easier to walk into than a general-purpose mixer. Doing Black Things With My Black Friends, at @blackthings_blackfriends, is a listings account rather than a club, and it is the best single feed for Black-led events across theatre, art, food and fitness in the city. London Social Nights for Black Professionals, run by The Kickback, is the version you can actually turn up to, with regular ticketed socials in the City and Clerkenwell.
Lonely Girls Club runs friendship speed dating, a book club and parties, and is unembarrassed about the name, which is half the battle. Between them and the hiking, running and theatre groups above, there is almost certainly something that has already found the people you would get on with.
House share on purpose
Flatsharing is the accidental friend-making machine, and London being what it is, most of us do it for years. SpareRoom has a buddy-up function alongside the room listings, with something like 14,000 people on it looking for someone to flat-hunt with rather than a room to move into. Useful to know if you are arriving here without a single phone number.
Whichever way round you do it, have an actual conversation before you sign anything, and ask the boring questions about cleaning, guests and how they feel about Sunday mornings. Trust us on this. A housemate from hell is not fun. The rest of the practicalities are in our piece on buying and renting in London.
And yes, go on dates
Obviously this one is for the singletons, but dating is a social route as much as a romantic one. Even when it goes nowhere, you have spent an evening talking to somebody new in a bar you would not have picked, and if it goes somewhere you inherit their entire friendship group, which is the fastest way anyone in this city has ever built a social life.
What we know about dating in London, and the singles events worth your evening, are both more use than another hour of swiping.
The London x London Take: the thing that works is repetition, not variety. One run club every Tuesday beats eight different one-off events, because friendship is mostly just the same faces turning up in the same place until somebody suggests a pint. So pick one thing from this list that happens weekly, put it in the diary for a month, and do not judge it on the first go. The first time is always a bit awkward. The fourth time you know three names.
Meeting people in London: practical tips
Stay sensible about meeting people from the internet in real life. First meetings in public, tell somebody where you are going, and trust the feeling if something is off. Soz for sounding like your mum.
Say yes to the follow-up. Most social lives die at the point where everyone had a lovely time and nobody suggested a second one. Be the person who sends the message, even though it feels needy. It is not needy, it is the only way any of this works.
And give it a season. Nobody makes a friend in a fortnight. Newly arrived? Our piece on moving to London is worth a read, and this weekend’s events will give you something to do in the meantime.
