All Star Lanes Brand Guidelines: Holborn 2006, a 2019 Pre-Pack & Retro London Bowling

Bowling as a night out.

All Star Lanes is a London bowling brand built around the idea of bowling as a night out with cocktails. It was founded in 2006 by Mark von Westenholz and Adam Breeden, according to Restaurant Online, the sister title of BigHospitality, in 2012 and City A.M. in 2019, and its first venue was in Holborn, in Bloomsbury. The company’s website still calls the Holborn site, in Victoria House on Bloomsbury Place, the place “where it all began.”

The aim, as Restaurant Online put it in 2012, was to make bowling more “intimate and fun,” with an emphasis on quality cocktails and food. Growth came quickly. In January 2007 the trade title Health Club Management reported that the operator, All Star Leisure, was opening two more London venues: one at the Whiteleys centre in Bayswater, then under construction, and another in the Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, where lease talks were well advanced. Von Westenholz, quoted as co-managing director, said demand at the Bloomsbury venue showed that London could sustain both, and the company said it planned to take the brand to Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow and Edinburgh from 2008.

By 2012 the group had four London sites — Holborn, Brick Lane, Bayswater and Westfield Stratford City — and was preparing its first outside the capital, in the Great Northern building off Deansgate in Manchester, with eight lanes, a private room with two more, a cocktail bar and a restaurant, Restaurant Online reported; it was to be similar in size to the Brick Lane venue, which the title called the flagship. “After six successful years in London we feel the time is right to expand,” von Westenholz said. That October, Breeden stepped down from the board to focus on Bounce, the table-tennis club he had just opened in Holborn; von Westenholz, by then chief executive, said Breeden had been non-executive for the previous couple of years. City A.M. noted in 2019 that Breeden had since launched other leisure ventures, Bounce among them.

Retro lanes, cocktails and a 2019 sale.

The format is boutique rather than big-box. The website describes “retro bowling lanes,” “vibrant cocktail bars” and “American comfort food,” alongside arcade games and karaoke booths, and calls the brand “the original one-stop party hangout.” Holborn, by the company’s own description, has four retro lanes, a 90-cover restaurant and a low-lit speakeasy cocktail bar. Confidentials, the Manchester food and drink site, described the Manchester venue in 2020 as an American-style dining spot and bowling alley known for its cocktails and its references to the film The Big Lebowski.

The business changed hands in 2019. On 17 September 2019 administrators from the advisory firm BDO were appointed by the High Court in Birmingham to All Star Leisure (Group) Limited and several of its venue companies, among them those for Brick Lane, Stratford, Shepherd’s Bush and Manchester, according to Companies House and a notice in The London Gazette published on 23 September. City A.M., reporting a Sunday Times story on 22 September, said the business had been sold the previous week to the investment firm Risk Capital Partners in a pre-pack administration handled by BDO. At that point, City A.M. said, All Star Lanes ran Holborn, Brick Lane, Westfield Stratford and Westfield White City in London, plus Manchester. Companies House records show that the new operating company, All Star Lanes Limited, was incorporated in September 2019 and is active, and that the old group’s administration ended in September 2026.

Manchester did not last under the new owner. The Great Northern Warehouse venue, which opened in 2013, closed for good in August 2020, Confidentials and The Manc reported; The Manc noted that the venue had been rescued from administration the year before. It had been the chain’s first venue outside London, and when it opened in 2013, Confidentials recalled, some 500 people applied for its 65 jobs. In November 2026 the website lists four London venues: Brick Lane, Holborn, Stratford and White City.

Venues and the way they are presented.

Bowling, competitive-socialising and indoor-leisure operators sell an evening out rather than a product, so their identities live mostly in rooms and on screens. Their own websites lead with venue interiors: lanes lit in neon, bars set beside the games, and photographs of groups mid-throw or mid-putt. Some build a whole venue around one period theme; Swingers, according to The Caterer, styles its crazy golf clubs on 1920s English country golf clubs.

Naming does a lot of the work. Swingers names its venues after their districts, such as the West End or Back Bay, and operators give house names to games that turn familiar pastimes into branded attractions: an arcade called Carnival, a shuffleboard called Supercharged Shuffle, a shooting game called HotShots. Kingpin’s 2017 identity, Mumbrella reported, put a bowling spare mark inside the name and adopted the line “Roll like a Royal.”

Booking is part of the identity too. Kingpin’s website, for example, opens with a venue picker, a date selector, party packages and gift cards, placed ahead of any story about the company. Some operators add a scoring tool inside the venue; Time Out listed a scorecard app among the features of one Swingers site.

Behind the venues sit owners that are often less visible than the brands. Kingpin belongs to TEEG, a group formed in 2017 by the family company behind Timezone and Quadrant Private Equity, and it is TEEG’s corporate website, rather than the venue site, that sets out the timeline and the brand list. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand, from founding and ownership to how it presents its venues, and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

An American mood in London buildings.

Ownership moved again in 2025. Companies House records show that on 28 April 2025 control of All Star Lanes Limited passed to a newly formed holding company, All Star Topco Limited.

All Star Lanes built its identity on a mood as much as a game. Its own descriptions lean on the American bowling alley — retro lanes, comfort food, cocktail bars, arcade games — while its venues sit in London addresses of their own: Victoria House in Bloomsbury, the Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, and two Westfield shopping centres. The brand also appears in other operators’ stories. Paul Barham, a co-founder of Red Engine, the company behind Flight Club, told the attractions-industry title blooloop in 2022 that All Star Lanes had struck him as “more boutique” than the bowling alleys he had known, though he felt the lanes themselves still took up much of the room.

For a design guide, All Star Lanes shows how a bowling brand can borrow American lounge and diner cues while staying rooted in a handful of London buildings. Compare Lucky Strike, the American bowling lounge brand, and Hollywood Bowl, a UK bowling operator. For this guide we use a cherry red, a cream and a gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep All Star Lanes’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.