Inside London's bizarre robot fight nights where machines battle for glory

From tiny robot gladiators to fears of a machine uprising, London's underground fighting scene is equal parts nostalgic, geeky and faintly terrifying

On the second Sunday of every month in Stoke Newington, Rock & Robots pits robot against robot in gladiatorial combat.

The machines are antweight rather than Russell Crowe-sized, but still: they brawl, shove, flip, splinter and occasionally expire for our entertainment.

As the event’s site says, “The fighters are robots, please don’t hit each other here.” One rule for us, a very different one for them. Started by the seemingly innocent Eli Gumble, Rock & Robots is something weird and glorious: a monthly robot fight night with indie music, karaoke and a Super Nintendo with two controllers in the corner.

How cosy can you get? Had my big brother wandered in to give me a dead arm, I would have been comfortingly teleported to the innocent days of my youth.

The event proudly bills itself as having brought regular robot combat back to London for the first time since the magnificent TV series Robot Wars, hosted by both Craig Charles and Jeremy Clarkson in its time, was filmed on a site now occupied by the O2 in 1997-98. And yes, there is something deeply nostalgic about watching small machines smash each other up while humans cheer.

It is old-school, lowbudget and faintly school-hall, with a jolly crowd willing to invest emotionally in something that looks as if it might have been built from the contents of a Year 9 technology cupboard. And yet, in this age of AI anxiety, is there something darker going on too? Is this just a charming geek scene, or are we all quietly choosing sides before the machines notice? Innocent fun or a dark future?

“There is something deeply nostalgic about watching small machines smash each other up while humans cheer”

Rock & Robots, after all, is only one regiment. The Queer Robot Fighting League is launching in Hackney, hosted at a vegan venue and designed to make combat robotics more accessible to beginners.

Its founder describes it as a way to open up a world too often coded as male. “As a femme queer myself I am no stranger to being told that I can’t do so-called manly things like engineering,” they say, “and I wanted to create a space where people can dip their toes in without that sentiment.”

So far, so wholesome. So needed, actually. Combat robotics, they argue, is a surprisingly friendly entry point into electronics: you learn by building, breaking, repairing and trying again. And as we all know, desk jobs are on the way out, hands-on gigs are where we’re heading. And yet, their tagline also includes “activist-led” and “beginner-targeted”, which, depending on your mood, either sounds wonderfully inclusive or like the first line of a future resistance manual.

Further afield in Wood Green, another vegan venue, Karamel, opened its doors for Live Robot Fighting last year, dubbed an “experimental event to prove that, yes, we can put on robot fights in the city”.

You can’t help wondering about robot rights. Does it feel hypocritical, all this save the animals, fight the machines? And yet, given these too are beetleweight, it all feels innocent enough. For now.

“London has arrived at a simpler moral framework: let them fight each other in rooms above pubs and veganvenues”

Elsewhere, though, robots are less cute. In California, regulators have reportedly had to step in after Robot Entertainment Kombat staged what it billed as the world’s first human-robot fight in San Francisco. The human was influencer Frankie LaPenna. The robot was six foot, humanoid and, disappointingly or reassuringly, not acting of its own free will, but operated remotely via a VR system. Less us versus them, then, and instead a more modern, extremely expensive Punch and Judy — minus the domestic abuse and the crocodile.

Still, it was kicking a man across a cage, which feels like the sort of thing probably worth keeping an eye on. Don’t hit the humans As it turned out, the California State Athletic Commission did — not sharing in the internet’s appetite for Terminator-adjacent content, it issued a cease-and-desist warning REK against staging unsanctioned combat events involving humans.

And this, I think, is where the little London robot scene becomes more than a very good Sunday. Because while regulators are trying to work out what machines should and should not be allowed to do to us, London has arrived at a simpler moral framework: let them fight each other in rooms above pubs and veganvenues, but please, for God’s sake, don’t hit the humans.

Maybe that is the appeal. Robot fighting makes the exhausting, and slightly terrifying, question of technology small enough to enjoy. Two tiny things fight. One tiny thing wins. We, meanwhile, drink beer. We sing. We have hangovers at work the next day. Nobody asks whether the job you’re going to be hungover at tomorrow will exist in five years.

For now, we simply applaud those little robots and their bravado as they fight it out on the teeny tiny stage. Robot Wars meets Roman decline, with better inclusivity policies and probably oat milk.

So is it nostalgia, or preparation? Probably both. At the very least, should the machines ever rise, I now know London contains several rooms full of people who understand motors, armour, wiring and the mechanics of tiny, furious machines. I am not saying this is an army. I am simply saying I would like to be on their mailing list.