Still open when
nothing else is.

Doors at 2pm on a weekday, noon at the weekend — and the early afternoon is the quietest the room gets, by some distance the best time to learn on a Heyball table. Nobody is waiting for it, nobody is watching, and you can spend forty minutes failing to pot a long ball without feeling like you are holding anybody up. It is also when Happy Hour runs.

The busiest stretch. A long room of Heyball tables means there is usually still one free, but if you are coming with three friends and want two tables together, this is the hour to ring ahead about.

Nine on a Tuesday in the city is a narrow set of options, and most of them are a table you have to give back when the kitchen closes. Here the table is the point, it is booked by the hour, and nobody is waiting for it back.

It is also the hour that shift workers actually have. A room that opens in the afternoon and runs to midnight is a room built around people whose day does not end at five.

Tables go dark one at a time as their lamps go off, which is the best thing a Heyball room does and the reason the film on the homepage is built the way it is. What is left is two or three lit rectangles in a black room and the sound of the balls. The last tables of the night go on now, an hour before close.

Two nights a week run this late. The last frame finishes, the last lamp goes off, and the room is black until noon. Sunday to Thursday the same thing happens at midnight.

An extra hour at the weekend, and the last of it is the part nobody who has played in a room like this forgets: one table still lit, three people who should have gone home, and somebody insisting on one more frame.