No Phone, No Social Safety Net: Welcome to the ‘Offline Club’

On battle, the room fell silent. A man sitting to the left of me at a long wooden table began to scratch on a piece of paper with a colored pencil. To my right, another guy picked up a book. On the other hand, someone buried themselves in a puzzle. We had gathered to participate in an unfamiliar ritual: being extreme offline.

I arrived at 6.45pm that Monday evening at a nondescript office block in Dalston, a recently gentrified area of ​​East London. I was greeted at the door by the event host, who was wearing a T-shirt that read: “The Offline Club.” I gave them my phone, which they stored in a specially built cabinet – a kind of shrunken capsule hotel.

The entrance opened into a narrow room with high concrete walls painted white, with enough space for about 40 people to sit. The wooden table ran down the center of the room, bordering both a bench area and a kitchen stocked with herbal teas and other beverages. Two plywood stairs lead up to mezzanines dressed with patterned fabric cushions and strutted with soft lighting. On the opposite wall, floor-to-ceiling windows were lined with ficus and other broad-leaved plants.

Attendees began to filter in, leaving their phones at the door. They ranged in age from roughly 25 to 40 years, fairly evenly split between the sexes. The collective wardrobe bore the hallmarks of the British winter – knitted woolens, corduroys, Chelsea boots, and so on – but with a fashionable flair typical of this part of town: a tattoo here, a turtleneck there. Many people had come alone and fell into conversation easily; I met a video producer, an insurance claims adjuster and, ironically, a software engineer for a large social media company. Others were more reserved, perhaps better attuned to the strangeness of the social occasion.

The group was drawn together by a shared ambition: to detach from their devices, even for just a little while. The Offline Club hosts similar phone-free events across Europe, and charges around $17 for entry. Early last year, London hangouts started selling out regularly.

“We talk about it as a gentle rebellion,” says Laura Wilson, cohost of the Offline Club's London branch. “Every time you're not on your phone, you're reclaiming yourself.”

Soon there was hardly an empty chair, stool or cushion in the room. The host signaled that it was time to stop talking. Following the example of others, I picked up a colored pencil and began scribbling with an inadequate and unpracticed hand.

“I feel like I'm addicted to my phone”

The Offline Club started in 2021 with an impromptu off-grid weekend in the Dutch countryside organized by Ilya Kneppelhout, Jordy van Bennekon, and Valentijn Kl. Finding the experiment instructive, the trio began hosting rare offline getaways in the Netherlands with the goal of sparking the kind of informal interaction between strangers that they now found a rarity in a device-driven world.

The three Dutchmen formally founded the Offline Club in February 2024 and started hosting hangouts in an Amsterdam cafe. Since then, they have exported the concept to 19 other cities, mainly in Europe, where each branch is run as a franchise by part-time organizers. The events typically follow a fixed format: an hour of silence, during which people are free to do something – read, puzzle, color, do crafts, etc. – followed by an hour's telephone conversation with the other attendees.

The format took off in London last summer, after the local branch attempted to set an unofficial world record by gathering 2,000 people at the top of Primrose Hill, central London. The goal was to see the sun without a bobbing sea of ​​cell phones to block the view. After that, people started getting tickets for the hangouts.