The whole thing occasionally has the air of a children’s party. “It’s like Butlin’s for adults,” jokes Alesha, a 34-year-old financial analyst I meet during one of the games. But it’s fun, and most importantly, it works. In the first 20 minutes, I probably had more conversations with strangers than I have in the last month.

“There are so many people in London, you never know who you’re talking to,” opines Max, the civil servant with whom I was choosing between rats and the nude triathlon. “You might start a conversation with a new friend, but you’re just as likely to end up talking to someone crazy. You don’t want to risk it. I hate to say it, but if a stranger talks to me in public, my first thought is “mental health issues”.

No wonder a Belonging Forum survey earlier this year found that 35% of Londoners said they felt lonely often or some of the time, compared to 28% for the rest of the UK. The survey found that young people and renters are disproportionately more lonely.

When I got to FriendZone, I expected to find most people around my age, late 20s or early 30s, but there’s a wide range, from students to adults. mid 50s.

Jo Perkins, a psychologist, says the long periods when people were unable to socialize in person during the pandemic hampered their ability to interact with strangers. “There was a disruption of that skill set of being able to make connections, and people lost confidence,” she says.

Switching to working from home didn’t help either, Alesha told me. “We used to go out for drinks with my team once a week, but now we’re never in the office at the same time and it’s just become more difficult to meet up,” she says.

More broadly, Perkins says, “Clients often tell me they’re lonely when their friends are at different stages of life than they are. In the past, friendship groups would have moved at the same pace – find a partner, get married, move out, have kids. But now people do these things in different orders, or not at all, and that creates challenges for friendships.”