Everyone is drinking and singing along — badly — to karaoke classics in the parents’ bedroom. There’s an old Nintendo 64 in the corner. Red Solo cups litter the beer pong table and you can hear the bass of someone’s terrible AUX cord song choice in the soles of your feet. You know next to nobody here. You lost your friend in the queue for the toilets and now you’re frantically texting them from a corner of the kitchen while trying to ignore the strangers snogging each other next to you. Several people are vaping in what they think is a surreptitious way, so they don’t get told off. This is, for all intents and purposes, a house party. In a sense. It’s just not a real one. 

This is House Party, a club that opened a few weeks ago in Soho, which bills itself as “the ultimate house party experience in London”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it self-identifies as a “new and disruptive concept” (a series of words which mean absolutely nothing). 

“I’ve always loved the energy of a classic house party — it’s where the best memories are made,” said co-founder Stormzy in a pre-released statement to coincide with House Party’s launch. “We wanted to create a nostalgic experience where everyone is welcome, and no two nights are the same. We all know everyone wants to go to a house party, nobody really wants to host one — and this is exactly what this house is for.”

There is some truth in this press release. No one under the age of 45 wants to host house parties any more. Or perhaps more accurately — even if they wanted to, many couldn’t. Blame exorbitant rents pushing people out of town or into flats they certainly don’t want to damage. Blame house prices; fewer young people own houses to even have a party. The house party in all its sweaty, drunken, bombastic chaos is a dying art. So much so that those of us lusting after the dream of hosting pre-drinks in our own homes will trek into central London and pay upwards of a tenner for a drink (plus cover charge) to act out this experience instead.

Located on Poland Street, House Party is the zenith of Secret Cinema culture; the natural end point of the ‘‘immersive experience”; almost impressive in its attempt to monetise sentimentality. A seven-floor nightclub with bouncers outside (“no smoking indoors please, mum will kill me”, has become “no smoking indoors please, we’ll lose our licence”). “Our house. Your party”, it tells punters, who can, for a price, hang around in a fake basement or a fake living room — or hire it out for corporate and private events. 

House Party is the swan song, or perhaps the dying whale noise, for real house party culture, whose demise has long been prophesied. 

As far back as 2015, The New York Times was publishing eulogies for the house party, pointing out that for Zoomers, debauchery generally has somewhat lost its sheen; Gen Z drinks far less than its hard-partying, binge-happy millennial predecessors — in the US the number of high school seniors who said they never attended parties was cited as being a sobering 41.3 per cent, according to a University of California survey. Likewise, almost half of Britain’s youngest boozers — 44 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds — consider themselves to be either occasional or regular drinkers of “alcohol alternatives”, according to a 2024 YouGov survey. It also found that the age group was the most sober overall, with 39 per cent not drinking alcohol at all. Given that they’re paying more for both university and rent, it’s hard to blame them.

Yet their predecessors, millennials, are hardly still fighting the good fight for the house party either. This generation isn’t hosting ragers either, but it’s not alcohol related. We’re more likely to head into central London to spend eight quid on a pint, or hundreds on a curated immersive experience in Poland Street, clearly.