Granny – for Corporate Events
A seven-room escape experience built for corporate events and real teamwork.
Key details
The Story
Planning permission has been secured for a swanky new hotel in the heart of Bethnal Green.
One woman stands in the way of “progress”… Granny.
Granny lives in the last remaining house on Paradise Row, behind an abandoned bookshop. She’s barricaded herself inside, armed with a small arsenal of homemade defences, and is refusing to sell.
Developers who have entered the house to “talk sense” into her have come running out screaming — if they’ve come out at all.
Now the developers are desperate. They’re offering a generous reward to anyone brave enough to enter Granny’s house, survive the encounter, and convince her to sell.
Will that be you?
DISCLAIMER: There are unconfirmed reports of booby traps, an elaborate DIY security system, and previous visitors failing to return calls.
The Game
Granny is an escape room — but on an epic scale.
Instead of a linear sequence of puzzles across one or two rooms, Granny unfolds across an entire seven-room house. There is no prescribed order. Your team decides where to go, what to tackle first, and how to approach your mission. Those choices matter — and they’ll shape the experience.
This format naturally encourages leadership to emerge, team roles to form, and problem-solving to happen in parallel rather than in a single queue of tasks.
The challenges you’ll face are far more varied than in a traditional escape room. We find padlocks boring! Expect physical puzzles, environmental games, hidden mechanisms, and systems that respond dynamically to your decisions as the house comes alive around you.
This is a non-linear experience. Solving one puzzle doesn’t simply open the next door (in fact, all doors are unlocked throughout). Progress comes from exploration, experimentation, rapid communication, and piecing together the story. As your team moves through the house, you’ll uncover fragments of Granny’s past — and those discoveries can change what tools and information are available to you.
Even the in-game clue system must be unlocked through your actions, rewarding teams who stay observant and engaged.
The scale of the house allows groups to split into smaller units, pursue different objectives simultaneously, and share discoveries as they go. Granny plays comfortably with as few as four players and up to eighteen, making it ideal for away days, department meet-ups, or full-team outings. Smaller groups succeed just as well — success isn’t about numbers; it’s about communication, creativity, and adaptability under pressure.
Entry Instructions
Meet outside Thorne's bookshop at the time stated within your Itinerary.
Testimonials
“Amazingly well thought-out escape room with multiple rooms and accommodating of large groups… So much fun, highly recommend.” – Cicero Hammy
Our clients
FAQs
Why is Granny a great choice for corporate events?
- Scales effortlessly for large groups: The seven-room, non-linear house allows teams to split up and work in parallel, keeping everyone actively involved.
- Encourages natural leadership: With no fixed puzzle order, leadership roles emerge organically as teams decide how to approach the experience.
- Strengthens communication: Success depends on sharing discoveries across rooms and coordinating actions in real time.
- Values diverse skill sets: Physical challenges, logic, observation, creativity, and coordination all play a role — everyone can contribute.
- Reveals team dynamics under pressure: The immersive environment highlights decision-making, adaptability, and collaboration in a realistic but safe way.
- Creates lasting shared memories: Teams leave with strong shared stories that reinforce bonding long after the event ends.
How intense is the experience — and is it appropriate for the workplace?
Granny is not a gore-based or shock-horror experience. There’s no blood, no graphic content, and nothing designed to make participants uncomfortable in a workplace context.
Instead, the tension comes from time pressure, uncertainty, and immersion. The house feels alive, decisions matter, and teams must think on their feet — which raises adrenaline in a way that’s exciting rather than frightening.
This sense of pressure is what makes the experience so effective for team building. It encourages clear communication, quick decision-making, and calm problem-solving under stress — without crossing into anything inappropriate.
For corporate groups with differing comfort levels, the experience is fully adjustable. Granny can be run without live actors, or with intensity reduced, ensuring everyone feels comfortable while still enjoying a challenging, memorable experience.
Why don’t you give a traditional pre-show briefing?
Because the experience begins the moment you arrive.
We don’t believe immersion should be something you switch on after a safety talk. Being gathered together and told “this is a game, here’s how it works” immediately pulls you out of the world we’ve spent years building.
Instead, Granny starts without announcement. There is no pre-show performance, no out-of-character explanation, and no moment where someone tells you what’s about to happen. You’re not entering a game — you’re stepping into a situation.
Everything you need to know is communicated naturally, in-world, as events unfold. This allows tension, curiosity, and atmosphere to build without interruption, and lets you discover the experience for yourselves rather than being instructed how to play it.
It’s a deliberate design choice.
We trust our players to adapt, explore, and work things out together — just as they would if this were real.
How can 18 players all play Granny at the same time?
The puzzles don’t change.
What changes is how much is happening at once.
Granny is designed so the same challenges work just as well for four people as they do for eighteen. Nothing becomes locked behind a single person or a single task, and there’s never a point where everyone is expected to stand around waiting.
With more people in the house, more things are active at the same time. Different rooms draw attention simultaneously. Discoveries overlap. Conversations happen in parallel.
Some players will be hands-on, tackling physical challenges. Others will be exploring, spotting patterns, sharing discoveries, or keeping track of what’s happening elsewhere. Roles tend to emerge on their own as the experience unfolds. The house doesn’t tell you how to organise yourselves — and there’s no single “right” way through it.
Whether you arrive as a small group or a large one, Granny stays busy. The challenge isn’t finding something to do — it’s deciding what to focus on next.
Do you have a clue system?
Yes — but not a traditional one.
There is no button to press, no camera to look at, and no out-of-world voice telling you what to do next. All information is delivered in-world, as part of the environment itself.
Guidance may appear through phone calls, printed materials, background interruptions, service messages, or systems embedded in the house. Some of it is useful. Some of it is partial. Some of it only makes sense later. Occasionally, it raises more questions than it answers.
This is intentional.
Granny is designed as a continuous, self-contained world. Stepping outside it to request a “clue” would collapse the fiction — and the responsibility — that the experience is built around. Instead of being told what to do, teams are expected to observe, interpret, share information, and decide how to proceed.
Information exists in the house.
What you do with it is up to you.
Why don't you accept late-comers?
Granny begins as soon as the fixed 15-minute check-in window closes.
All of our systems — including safety checks, consent recording, data protection, and in-world personalisation — assume that once this window ends, the experience is already underway and no additional people will enter.
Allowing someone in after that point would place them outside those systems, which we’re legally and operationally unable to do.
For this reason, even if you let us know you’re running late, we can’t admit anyone once the check-in window has closed.
We strongly recommend arriving early and reading the pre-show information we send you. Doing so ensures a smooth check-in and allows the experience to run exactly as intended.