The great British switch-off: how floating retreats, mobile-free pubs and sauna book groups are freeing people from their smartphones

Sick of doomscrolling? From venues with smartphone swear jars to cabins with absolutely no signal, here are the fun and freeing ways to ditch your device

There’s a ritual at the start of every event hosted by the Offline Project. Run by Pelé Zachariah, the activities vary – it could be a group walk, a collage‑making class or a supper club – but each one begins in the same way, *with an invitation to hand over your phone. Devices go in a lockbox. Once they’re all in, Zachariah closes the door and turns the key. “I don’t place them in for people, because it’s nice for them to physically put it in the box themselves, walk away, and think: for the next two or three hours, I’m fully present.”

He has been running these screen-free events in London since August 2025. First-timers can be apprehensive about being separated from their phone. “You can sense the vibe when they’re putting it away,” says Zachariah. “People have said to me, ‘I felt really weird’ or ‘I felt super uncomfortable for the first few minutes not having my phone on me.’ Then they’ll say, ‘I didn’t know how much I needed that.’”

Zachariah understands why people might find it difficult at first. “It’s very unnatural. You might put your phone in the living room while you work in the kitchen, but here you’re seeing it locked behind what is essentially a gate that you can’t access,” he says. But when people leave, they often say they would like to have their own phone lockbox, or tell him that they’re going to try to not look at their device until they get home. “It’s kind of sad that we have to literally lock our phones away. But people really crave that time.”

This is true for Jarred Laros, 31, who lives in Essex and has been a regular at the Offline Project since it launched. One of the first events he went to was a “paint and sip” evening, where an artist taught everyone how to paint a landscape scene with mountains, a river and a sunset. People sat around a table together, working on their canvases while having drinks and snacks, and getting to know each other. “I liked the idea of getting off my phone and being more intentional with how I’m spending my time. I would never try to teach myself how to paint, but doing that in a community setting is very easy-going. The conversation flows.”

Laros runs his own business, and spends a lot of time on his devices. “I’m always glued to a screen, whether it’s my iPad, my MacBook, my phone, or all three at the same time,” he says. “Outside of work, there’s the doomscroll that you succumb to. I go on Instagram without intending to. Half an hour later, I’m, like, ‘What am I still doing on this app?’ My average daily screen time is seven and a half hours. My relationship with my phone is not what I want it to be.”

The Offline Project is part of a new wave of digital detox communities that host events to give people time away from screens. It’s not hard to understand the appeal: adults in the UK now spend an average of four and a half hours onl...