The start-up fusing pints with putters

The first time I went into Junkyard Golf, back in March, on a wet Thursday afternoon, the place was buzzing. The vast interior had the vibe of a nightclub with loud music and flashing lights and cavorting bodies and a bar, but with the addition of crazy golf. It was like being at the seaside but in the middle of London, around the corner from Liverpool Street station. “It’s on the edge of raucous,” said Matthew Lake, co-founder and Managing Director. “We wanted it to be like a very big house party where you can come and have fun with your mates.”

I’ve just been back there and the good news is Junkyard Golf has officially re-opened. I’m going back again next week to have a round. In the midst of Covid-19, Mat (as he asks me to call him) became a father for the first time. “It was spooky driving through town with no one around. Even Christmas Day was busier than that.” Junkyard Golf now boasts sanitation stations, queue management, and the washing of every single club and ball. With the addition of table service and drinks menu codes on the tables. “The biggest change is the music,” says Mat. “We had to turn it down so you can hear what someone is saying at two metres.”

Mat did not set out with a dream of junkyard golf. Now 42, born in Doncaster, he studied history of film at Manchester Metropolitan University. And he did a PhD too and ended up teaching film studies, from the Lumière Brothers to 2001 and beyond. “It was back when you did a degree for fun,” says Mat. But he was leading a double life. A student/academic by day, he was a bartender by night, who ultimately went into bar management. He got to know another three guys, all doing similar things, so they pooled their skills and experience and wisdom and came up with “Friday Food-Fight” in a pop-up.

Mat is a big guy with a big beard and is tattooed from head to toe. “I circumvented the problem of which one to have by getting them all,” he says. His knuckles bear the slogan, STAY TRUE. “It was either that or ‘LIVE FAST’. There’s a limit to how many four-plus-four letter combinations you can have.” Maybe it should be JUNK YARD.

There is still a dispute as to who first came up with the idea. Four guys sitting around with an already rented pop-up space in Manchester and wondering what to put in it. “I know,” says one of them. “Let’s do crazy golf!” The rest is history.

The first Junkyard Golf really was fashioned out of the contents of a junkyard (and a charity shop and assorted skips) for only £1,000. And most of that was spent on the clubs. But it sold out straight away. After three months in Manchester they took out a six-month lease in London, at the Truman Brewery on Brick Lane. “People seemed to like doing it,” says Mat, “so we thought we’d better make it a proper business.”

He agrees there was no grand plan or vision. “We were trying to pay the rent and make a living. Some people have a goal – but that wasn’t us. We were just lucky beneficiaries of a shift in the zeitgeist.” As a barman, he was able to observe at close quarters that people were drinking less and trying to live healthier lives. The old Rovers Return or Queen Vic culture was fading fast. “People don’t want to sit in pubs and swill beer now. When I was younger you went to a bar then you went to a nightclub. Now people want experiences – which is a fancy way of saying they want to do something.”

Mat’s theory is that a lot of young people were finding it impossible to buy a house. No one was saving up for a new fridge/freezer or a dishwasher any more. But they might have enough money to pay for a night out. He admits that they owe a lot to social media. “We wouldn’t be where we are now without Instagram. This is the Instagram generation. They want to share the experience. They’re coming to Junkyard with their friends – but baked into that is the ability to share it with other people online. That’s a massive shift.”

The Junkyard set-up is designed to be filmic and photogenic. The one in London cost more like a million than a thousand. Each hole evokes a distinct scene. There is a dystopian fairground with murderous clowns. Another one where you have to chip the ball into some rotating skulls. One hole with an electric chair is called “Absolute Shocker”. Other features include a lady sawn in two, an iron maiden, and a hall of distorting mirrors. Somehow a urinal gets in there too. A lot of the kit, like the bumpers cars and the carousel horses, was reclaimed from an end-of-pier amusement arcade. Some of it is purpose-built at their workshop in Trafford Park.

“Polluted paradise” is how Mat sums up the theme. “We are deliberately low-tech,” he says. “There are no giant screens. You get stubby pencils and a paper score card. If people want to take it seriously they can. If they just want to have a laugh that’s fine too.” There is no question that Junkyard golf has struck a chord with a huge cross-section. Stag and hen nights are massive here. And they get a lot of Tinder dates – “You can’t get to know one another at the flicks,” says Mat. “And this is time-limited, you can see how it goes.”

Junkyard Golf has sprung up in Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and Oxford. Last year they starred in the Sunday Times “Fast Track 100” list as the second-fastest growing company in the UK. Mat shakes his head in disbelief. “It’s amazing, really,” he says, with disarming modesty. “We just cobbled an idea together and ran with it.”

Of course, the Liverpool Street area, like the rest of the City, is different post-lockdown. “It’s so dependent on office workers here,” says Mat. “Everything is oriented towards office workers and if the office workers aren’t there…” He says they wouldn’t have a business any more if not for the furlough scheme and accommodating landlords. “The events industry has had it harder than anyone.” Now they’ve taken on more staff to cope with all the new social distancing measures they’ve put in place.

On the Friday night in March the Manchester venue went into lockdown they had taken just £7 – and so it remained until August. In the same period last year they took £7 million. They are now down to around 50% of where they were. After re-opening, Matthew Lake remains optimistic. “We might just about break even this year. We’ll get through this.”