There are venues in sport and there are institutions. The difference is the person running them. Without Bob Potter, Lakeside Country Club in Frimley Green was a well-regarded entertainment complex in the Surrey commuter belt. With him, it became something darts fans talked about in the same breath as Wembley and Lord’s. Not in scale. In meaning.
Who Was Bob Potter
Potter was born into the kind of background that didn’t hand you anything. He started, as many did in post-war Britain, by doing the legwork — booking bands into venues, working the phones, building contacts the slow way. He was good at it. Good enough that by the early 1960s he was booking acts that mattered: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones. Not after they were famous. When the momentum was building and the smart money was already in.
In 1972 he bought Wharfenden House in Frimley Green, Surrey — a Georgian property with grounds and a lake. He saw something others didn’t. He expanded it, doubled the hall to roughly 1,000 seats, and built Lakeside Country Club into one of the premier cabaret and entertainment venues in the country. The names that came through that room were the names you’d put on a best-of British entertainment compilation: Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Marvin Gaye, Cliff Richard. Comedians who were household names — Tommy Cooper, Morecambe and Wise, Bruce Forsyth, Jimmy Tarbuck. The kind of bill that put Frimley Green on the map in a way nobody expected of a Surrey village.
He was not a passive operator. Potter ran Lakeside personally, obsessively. He was the host, the promoter, the face. That instinct for showmanship — the understanding that what people came for wasn’t just the act but the experience around it — would matter enormously when darts arrived.
How He Got Darts at Lakeside
The BDO World Darts Championship didn’t begin at Lakeside. For its first seven years, from 1978, it was held at Jollees Cabaret Club in Stoke-on-Trent — a working-class northern venue that suited the sport’s identity at the time. Gritty, loud, no-frills.
In 1986, BDO founder Olly Croft moved the championship south. Lakeside was the choice. The reasoning was partly practical — a more accessible venue with better facilities — and partly about ambition. Croft wanted the World Championship to feel like a world championship. Potter wanted a flagship event that would anchor Lakeside’s calendar. It was a deal that suited both men.
What neither could have fully predicted was that Frimley Green, January, would become almost mythological. Queuing in the cold to get into a Surrey country club to watch men throw small metal objects at a board. And yet that was exactly what happened, year after year, from 1986 through to 2019. Thirty-four years at the same address.
What He Built
Forget the PDC arenas for a moment. The O2, Alexandra Palace, the production-value spectacle of Premier League Darts. Lakeside was something completely different.
The darts arena held around 1,100 people. That’s it. 1,100 people, packed in close, the board lit under TV lights, the crowd near enough to the players that you could see the sweat. Which in January, when the nerves were up, you very much could.
The intimacy was the point. You weren’t watching from a corporate tier behind glass. You were in the room. The smell of the place on a packed championship night — stale lager, carpet that had seen better decades, cigarette smoke that lingered in the walls long after the smoking ban — that was Lakeside. That was the atmosphere Potter had built and deliberately preserved. He understood that intimacy was a competitive advantage, not a limitation.
Around the arena sat the rest of the complex: restaurants, bars, a hotel. You could arrive Friday, stay over, catch the evening session, eat, drink, watch the oche all day Saturday. It was designed to be experienced, not just attended.
Celebrity and Culture at Lakeside
What other darts sites miss about Potter — and most do miss this — is that Lakeside was never purely a darts venue. It was an entertainment institution that happened to host the world darts championship. That distinction mattered.
The Royal Family visited on multiple occasions. Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Princess Margaret, the Duke and Duchess of Kent — Lakeside attracted establishment Britain as naturally as it attracted working-class darts fans, which was itself remarkable. Margaret Thatcher reportedly considered it one of her preferred venues for Conservative Party events. Potter had built something with genuine cross-class pull. That isn’t an accident. That’s a talent.
There’s a footnote here that tells you something about his cultural footprint. Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights — the Channel 4 series about a northern club owner trying to rebuild after a fire — drew, in part, on Potter’s life. Lakeside itself suffered a serious fire in the 1970s. Potter rebuilt it. Brian Potter in Phoenix Nights does the same. Potter publicly acknowledged the parallel. It’s the kind of detail that doesn’t make the darts record books but tells you what sort of man he was: someone whose story was big enough to inspire fiction.
The End
The BDO’s final years were not comfortable watching. Prize money stagnated. The PDC took the marquee players. TV coverage shrank. By the time the 2020 World Championship moved from Lakeside to the Indigo at The O2 — a decision that felt like the last throw of the dice — the writing was clearly on the wall.
The BDO went into liquidation in September 2020. Thirty-four years of Lakeside championships, ended. Not with a final at Frimley Green but with an administrative filing and a press release.
Bob Potter died on 14 April 2023, aged 94. He received his OBE in 1993 — for services to darts and entertainment — and he deserved it. The WDF had already revived world championship darts at Lakeside from 2022, and paid its respects immediately when he passed.
The venue survived. The WDF World Championship returned to Frimley Green, which was the right outcome, even if it wasn’t quite the same. It couldn’t be. What Potter built was specific to him — his instinct for atmosphere, his relationships, his stubbornness about what Lakeside should be. You don’t replace that with a new organiser and the same carpet.
But Lakeside is still there. Still in Frimley Green. Still, on the right January night, feels like the home of darts.
