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.

The events are meant as a remedy to the noisy, frenetic, and impersonal qualities of city life, says Wilson, where every nano-unit of time is measured and held to schedule by alerts and reminders served up by our smartphones. “It’s like a free pocket of time where you kind of have no responsibilities for a while,” she says. “It’s reigniting that magic of when you’ve hung out with people for no reason and you had no sense of time passing.”

On the evening I attended, people had come for a variety of reasons. For some, it was firmly about escaping the perceived tyranny of their phone; for others, it was about achieving a state of deep concentration; and for some, it was more like an excuse to absorb themselves in a creative pursuit or to meet new people.

The first person to arrive, a regular at the Offline Club who introduced himself as Max, appeared to be the most ardent about the practice of being offline out of all the attendees I met. An analog man, he said he uses a smartphone only begrudgingly for work, and has never had a social media account despite going through school at the dawn of Facebook. When the room fell silent, he reached for a copy of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, a popular treatise on the perils of social media.

Another attendee said they grew up in Cornwall, the southernmost county in England, in the Quaker church. Now living in London, she was searching for an approximation of her experience at Quaker meetings, large portions of which are spent in collective, silent contemplation.

One person, Sangeet Narayan, introduced himself jokingly to the group as an imposter: Narayan emigrated to London last year from Bangalore, India, to work for Meta. By day, Narayan codes up the notification system for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, but he had come along that evening hoping to shake his dependency on some of those same apps.

“I feel I am addicted to my phone,” he told me after the event. “I feel the urge to see my phone—to open it, just for no reason.”

No Conversational Safety Net

On that Monday evening, it took a while for me to acclimatize to the combination of hush and collective concentration, which had the quality of the opening minutes of an exam minus the simmering anxiety. People seemed to be thoroughly engrossed in whatever they were doing.

Narayan told me he found himself resisting the urge to look around to see what other people were up to. Doing so felt like a betrayal in a way that, say, glancing around a train carriage does not. “It felt like I was looking into their private lives,” says Narayan. But soon he became absorbed in his own thing.

“It was quite an unusual feeling,” says Eleanor, a management consultant and first-time attendee who asked to be identified by her first name only. “But there was a lovely sense that everyone in the room was really leaning into it.”

Twice, I found myself reaching to my pocket where my phone should be, to check how much time had elapsed. A flash of panic—I must have lost it somewhere!—gave way to embarrassment at this unwelcome evidence of my own pre-programming. As I took notes or messed with the coloring pencils, though, I was able to forget the 40 strangers in the room.

The silent hour concluded abruptly when the host yanked the plug from the speakers that had been piping faint piano music and acoustic guitar into the room. Though nobody said so explicitly, I detected a reluctance to emerge from the cocoon of silence. But it was time to socialize—without a phone to act as a safety net during conversational lulls.

I struck up with the people nearest. We chatted about the silent activities they had chosen and the books they were reading, the prospect of raising children in the smartphone era, and the recent social media ban in Australia. A couple of times, things ground to a halt. One person remarked that coming to offline events had put them at ease with awkward pauses.

The conversation turned often to a hypocrisy shared widely among the group: a belief that doomscrolling impinges upon leisure time, notifications disturb peace, and algorithms pollute discourse, paired with a simultaneous unwillingness to forfeit any of those things. Most people said they first heard about the Offline Club on Instagram. But that didn’t appear to shake people’s conviction in the worth of a brief offline experience.

“I left the event weirdly feeling more energized. That really surprised me,” says Eleanor.

When it came time to leave, I queued up to retrieve my phone. Before I made it to the street, I picked up a call from my partner, wondering where I was. I popped in my ear buds and selected some music, then tapped open Google Maps to look up the way home.