London calling: a paintball player takes cover behind a sign at Sharjah Paintball Park.
London calling: a paintball player takes cover behind a sign at Sharjah Paintball Park.
London calling: a paintball player takes cover behind a sign at Sharjah Paintball Park.
London calling: a paintball player takes cover behind a sign at Sharjah Paintball Park.

Sharjah paintball centre recreates English capital


  • English
  • Arabic

SHARJAH // It feels like walking into a video game. Gun-toting combatants swarm the streets of London, ducking behind a black cab for cover.

This is the scene that greets paintball enthusiasts in a warehouse at the Sharjah Golf and Shooting Club.

A miniature London, complete with a Harrods storefront and red phone booths, has been created for "urban combat".

Ziad Al Sharabi, the sales and marketing manager at the club, says once staff members dreamed up the scenario of the streets of London, the ideas started to flow.

"What we put in our minds, we made it," Mr Al Sharabi says. "We wanted to recreate something and we needed buildings, postboxes, trees, the red phone booths and even Hyde Park."

All of this in a space of 21 metres by 40 metres.

Before the game begins, players pick up their guns and ammunition in the Knightsbridge Tube Station. They enter a near-perfect replica of a metro carriage, complete with red seats and advertisements.

On a screen at the back of the carriage is a projector with a five-minute loop of footage taken from the back of a car driving around Leicester Square.

After a quick briefing, players exit the Tube (mind the gap) and dodge the paint-filled pellets from enemy combatants on Carnaby Street.

Almost all of the furnishings were imported from the UK. Mr Al Sharabi oversaw the delivery of the famous red phone boxes - without the phone - the postboxes and a London black cab without its engine.

A classic 1970s Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, engine intact, sits outside the mock Ritz Hotel. It was bought locally and is not exempt from a daily spray of bullets.

The doors are locked and players cannot shoot from inside the car, which has the original leather and wood trimmings.

Players can shield themselves from pellets inside the Ritz before making a dash to Harrods or across Hyde Park, which features the Serpentine Lake painted on the floor among the artificial trees that stand about five metres tall.

A white-painted tea shop and a paper boutique sit at the end of Oxford Street, which joins Carnaby. There is a ladder to the first floor of the boutique, where a sharpshooter can take out unsuspecting enemies.

Everything on the course, including the Rolls-Royce, is covered in a special paint so each night the pellet splotches can be washed off with power hoses.

Mr Al Sharabi says the club is close to installing a replica bank, which even has a safe. They are in the process of selecting a bank to name it after. He says the bank ATM to sit at the main door will not have any cash in it.

"Everything else will be the same," he says.

The bank will have male and female waiting rooms that are a perfect setting for gun battles. Players can attack those behind the teller desks or inside the mortgage application office. The safe will have a hidden door on the inside.

"Usually you can't see the door as it's flush with the wall," Mr Al Sharabi says.

"You think you're stuck but if you push it, it opens and there is another room with another white flush door. When that opens you come out the other side of the field."

The sound of airplanes flying above the indoor arena from the nearby Sharjah Airport adds to the atmosphere.

Playing with a group of girlfriends, Rana Al Waqfi, 21, takes shelter behind the taxi to avoid a hail of pellets.

"It is really good in there as it's dark and really good fun," Ms Al Waqfi , from Jordan, says after leaving the course and re-emerging in the Tube carriage with a large orange splat on her goggles.

"I've never been to London but it looks like the real thing from what I know on television."

Lina Mazeen, 21, says it is her first time playing and she particularly likes the layout of the course and the London fittings, which add to the experience.

"I'd rather be outside and like the weather and be around real trees," Ms Mazeen says. "But it looks like London, especially with the old cars."

Conflict, drought, famine

Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.

Band Aid

Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.

COMPANY PROFILE
Name: HyperSpace
 
Started: 2020
 
Founders: Alexander Heller, Rama Allen and Desi Gonzalez
 
Based: Dubai, UAE
 
Sector: Entertainment 
 
Number of staff: 210 
 
Investment raised: $75 million from investors including Galaxy Interactive, Riyadh Season, Sega Ventures and Apis Venture Partners
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