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

On cue, the room fell silent. A man seated to my left at a long wooden table began to scratch at a piece of paper with a coloring pencil. To my right, another guy picked up a book. Across the way, someone buried themselves in a puzzle. We had gathered to take part in an unfamiliar ritual: being extremely offline.

I arrived at 6:45 pm 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 handed them my phone, which they stowed in a specially built cabinet—a sort of shrunken-down capsule hotel.

The entryway opened into a narrow room with high concrete walls painted white, with space enough for about 40 people to sit. The wooden table ran down the center of the room, bordering both a couch area and a kitchenette stocked with herbal teas and other drinks. Two plywood staircases led up to mezzanines dressed with patterned fabric cushions and strung with soft lighting. On the opposite wall, floor-to-ceiling windows were lined with ficus and other broad leafy plants.

The attendees began to filter in, leaving their phones at the door. They ranged in age from roughly 25 to 40, fairly evenly split between the genders. The collective wardrobe bore the hallmarks of British winter—knitted woolens, corduroys, Chelsea boots, and so on—but with a modish flair typical of this part of town: a tattoo here, a turtleneck there. Many people had come alone and fell easily into conversation; I met a video producer, an insurance claim adjustor and, ironically, a software engineer for a major 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 be unglued from their devices, even for just a little while. The Offline Club puts on similar phone-free events across Europe, charging around $17 for entry. Beginning last year, London hangouts began to sell out regularly.

“We talk about it as a gentle rebellion,” says Laura Wilson, cohost of the Offline Club’s London branch. “Any time you’re not on your phone, you’re claiming back for yourself.”

Soon, there was barely an empty chair, stool, or cushion in the room. The host signaled that it was time to stop talking. Following other people’s example, I picked up a coloring pencil and with an indelicate and unpracticed hand began to scrawl.

“I Feel I Am Addicted to My Phone”

The Offline Club began in 2021 with an impromptu off-grid weekend in the Dutch countryside organized by Ilya Kneppelhout, Jordy van Bennekon, and Valentijn Klol. Finding the experiment instructive, the trio started to host infrequent offline getaways in the Netherlands with the purpose of kindling the kind of informal interaction between strangers that they felt is now a rarity in a device-governed world.

The three Dutchmen formally founded the Offline Club in February 2024 and began to host hangouts in an Amsterdam café. Since then, they have exported the concept to 19 other cities, predominantly in Europe, with each branch run like a franchise by part-time organizers. The events typically follow a set format: an hour of silence, during which people are free to do whatever—reading, puzzling, coloring, crafts, and so on—followed by an hour of phone-free 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 summit of Primrose Hill, central London. The aim was to watch the sunset without a bobbing sea of phones to block the view. After that, people started to snap up tickets to the hangouts.