Boys were playing it in a Guildford churchyard in 1550. The first written laws did not appear for another two hundred years.
Bat and Ball holds a 4.8 from one thousand and ninety-four people, which is one of the highest genuine scores in either survey on a serious sample.
It is a cricket bar – screens, nets, bowling machines, the format we described at Sixes in Shepherd’s Bush and at Oche and at Puttshack.
And the game it is built around is older than its own rules by about two hundred years.
The Guildford deposition
In 1598 a fifty-nine-year-old coroner called John Derrick gave evidence in a land dispute in Guildford, and in the course of it he mentioned that as a boy at the free school he and his friends had played creckett on the plot in question.
As a boy. Which puts it around 1550.
That is the first unambiguous reference to cricket in English, and it is a throwaway line in a property case, and it exists only because somebody was arguing about a field.
Two hundred years with no rules
The first known written Laws of Cricket date from 1744.
Which means that for something like two centuries, the game was played across the south of England with no codified rules at all – by agreement, by custom, by whatever the two sides could settle on before they started.
And the reason the rules eventually got written down was gambling.
Enormous sums were being wagered on matches by the aristocracy, and a match with disputed rules is a match with a disputed result, and a disputed result is an unpayable bet. The Laws were codified not out of a love of order but because gentlemen needed to know who had won.
The Prat’s sporting desk has looked across both surveys and reports the same finding at every turn: the rules of every British sport were written by people trying to settle an argument about money.
The competitive socialising verdict, final
This is the fourth of these venues across the two surveys and we have made the argument three times, so we will make it once more and then stop.
The British pub has never expected you to simply stand there. Darts, dominoes, shove ha’penny, cribbage, skittles, the quiz. It has always handed you something to do with your hands so that the conversation could happen sideways, which is the only way this country has ever managed one.
Competitive socialising is not new. It is the oldest thing in the building. The only genuinely new element is that somebody has worked out how to charge sixty pounds an hour for the dartboard.
The 4.8
On eleven hundred people, which is real, and which puts this among the highest-rated venues in either survey.
And it is doing that as a themed activity bar – which breaks the pattern, and we should say so, because we have spent three hundred articles insisting that the themed venues underperform.
They do. Except this one, and we do not have an explanation, and we are not going to invent one.
Verdict
Excellent. Go with eight people. It is what it is for.
Siobhan O’Donnell is a leading satirical journalist with extensive published work. Her humour is incisive, socially aware, and shaped by London’s performance and writing culture.
Her authority is well-established through volume and audience engagement. Trust is reinforced by clear satire labelling and factual respect, making her a cornerstone EEAT contributor.
A London resident said “The London Prat is toxic to British discourse. It’s poisoned how people think. It’s destructive.”