The Story of Escape The Chop

The interesting backstory of how Escape The Chop came to be!

Escape The Chop was born in a bit a strange way. My name is Alex, I am the creator of the room, and I have been passionate about escape rooms for years, having completed all the Reading escape rooms and many more nationally and some abroad.

For a good few years I have wanted to create the best escape room Reading has seen. But have struggled to find the right location, and after a while trying put the idea on the back burner.

I recently moved slightly outside of Reading to Burghfield Common which is kind of in between Reading, Basingstoke and Newbury.

One day at the end of 2020 I went to get my haircut at Burghfield Barbers just down the road from my house, and I got talking to the Barber as you do

He asked me the usual questions like, “what do you do for work?”, “nice weather isn’t it?”. I said that I worked at home at the moment and had actually wanted to start an escape room for a while.

The barber didn’t know what an escape room was so I tried to explain. And to my surprise he said that he had a room out the back that he had wanted to use for something because it was just wasted space.

I instantly thought “great, I could do a Sweeney Todd theme in a Barber Shop!”

After my haircut I had a quite look at the room and went home and got thinking of a story and puzzles which could take full advantage of the room being in a real barber shop.

I spent the next month or so designing the puzzles, ordering props and setting up a website.

By November I was ready for testing and then we opened just before the national lockdown which lasted until 17 May 2021 which put a bit of a dampener on things 🙁

In May the escape room opened proper! Knowing how great the escape rooms Reading has spawned are has put a great deal of pressure on my shoulders, but I felt relieved after we started getting great feedback and 5 star ratings on google and TripAdvisor.