It’s a familiar conundrum to single nightclub goers. You’re by the dance floor, drink in hand, and meet the eye of a potentially significant other. Do you talk to them, buy them a drink or go dance together? Or should you instead challenge them to a game of ping pong?

This last, improbable, courtship catalyst is the basis for Bounce, a cavernous underground nightclub in Holborn, London, where drinking and dancing is organised around 17 table tennis tables. By coincidence, it happens to be the same building where, in 1901, the British manufacturer J. Jaques & Son trademarked an after-dinner parlour game for the upper classes as “ping pong”, in reference to the noise of the ball bouncing off the wooden bats.

“I was the geek playing [ping pong] and my mates wouldn’t play with me – so we wanted to put it at the centre of a club,” says Bounce’s co-founder, Dov Penzik. “I played table tennis my whole life and decided there was an opportunity to create something where people would socialise.”