The Guardian89%
The great British switch-off: how floating retreats, mobile-free pubs and sauna book groups are liberating people from their phones 25%
By Isabelle Aron30%
8/1/2026, 4:00:51 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Hasty Generalization, and Appeal to Authority, with Attempt to Sell a Product or Service as the most egregious example at 19.8% saturation with 487 hits. Analysis detected 2,639 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,462 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 32.4% and a BS Rank of 25% (19,422 of 25,732 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 75.50% of the article peer group.
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 online a day, and most of that is on their phones, according to Ofcom’s 2025 Online Nation report.
In 2025, the annual TouchPoints survey by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising found that British adults were spending more time on their phones than watching TV for the first time.
The government has recently announced that in spring 2027 it will bring in a social media ban for under-16s, which will include platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
When the news was announced, a teenage girl went viral when asked by a news reporter how she would spend all her newfound free time.
Her answer?
“Stare at a wall.”
Thankfully, if you want a break from your phone, there are plenty of things to do that are much more engaging.
As our lives are becoming ever-more online, people are starting to push back against the hold that technology has on us.
Sick of looking out at a sea of screens, some musicians are enforcing a no phones policy at their gigs.
Bob Dylan’s 2025 UK and Ireland tour, Fred Again’s gigs at Alexandra Palace in February, and Harry Styles’s one-off gig in Manchester in March this year all had rules against using phones.
It’s happening at comedy events, too – phones were placed in locked pouches at Sarah Silverman’s London Palladium gig last year, and Russell Howard’s current Don’t Tell the Algorithm tour promises “no phones, no distractions, just humans and jokes”.
“Nightclubs are meant to be dark for that dual sense of losing yourself and finding yourself at the same time.
Phones inhibit both of those things”
While some are seeking out pockets of time at events and venues where they can escape their smartphones, others are going one step further and ditching them altogether.
Cody Ramone, 31, from Derby, was using an old flip phone from 2015 until the pandemic, when life became more online than ever and he needed a smartphone again.
In 2024, he switched back to a “dumb phone”.
“I got tired of all the notifications and being constantly online,” he says.
Abandoning his smartphone has been transformative and given him time for more enriching activities.
“I get bored more.
Being bored is what drives you to try new things, pick up an old hobby, or think creatively.
My attention span has improved, so I read more and spend more time doing creative hobbies, like crochet.
I call people or hang out with them more often,” he says.
What is it that makes our phones so addictive?
“Digital media activates the same reward pathway as drugs and alcohol, releasing dopamine, our reward neurotransmitter, in a key area of the reward pathway in the brain,” says Anna Lembke, professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and the author of Dopamine Nation.
“Moving images are like catnip for the mammalian brain, leading to video-chaining, akin to ‘chain smoking’.
Once we begin, it’s hard to stop, even when we want to.”
The more time we spend on our phones, the more we become “desensitised to what we are seeing” and look for more “potent rewards to recreate that original experience of pleasure”, says Lembke.
“At the same time, we lose our ability to take joy in other more modest rewards, like watching a sunset, sharing a meal with friends, or reading a good book.
We spend more time scrolling alone.
We become increasingly dissatisfied and lonely.”
While that might sound like a bleak state of affairs, the good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way.
With the rise of phone-free experiences, it’s possible to detach yourself from your device, even if it’s temporarily.
“Part of having a healthier relationship with technology must include discrete periods of time when we are not using it, and instead fully present and interacting with the people and the world around us,” says Lembke.
“This means creating collective spaces where we come together device-free.”
From off-grid, tech-free cabins to the pubs where devices aren’t allowed, these are the places to escape your phone in the UK.
Spas and saunas
Spas are all about relaxing and switching off, but often these spaces aren’t phone-free.
That is changing, though, with some spas now enforcing phone bans.
The Bath Thermae Spa has a strict no phones policy – guests must put devices in a lockable pouch that’s kept in their locker.
At Careys Manor in the New Forest, there’s a digital detox spa break, which includes relaxing treatments, a complimentary journal and a phone amnesty box in the room.
Phones have been banned at the Bothy at Heckfield Place, Hampshire, since it launched in 2023.
“Seeing someone on their phone in a space dedicated to restoration felt out of alignment.
You are there to be with yourself, to listen inwardly, to slow down,” says the spa operations director, Reka Seres-Erdei.
It’s not just at spas – as sauna culture rapidly grows, many people are finding these spaces offer a welcome break from technology.
Ryan Haynes, 34, is a regular at London’s Community Sauna Baths, which has locations in Camberwell, Hackney Wick, Stratford, Walthamstow and Peckham.
You can’t take your phone into the sauna, but you’re allowed to take photos outside, although they are considering a phone ban throughout.
Haynes’s Wednesday morning sauna session is “non-negotiable” for him.
“All of my best ideas in the past two years have been while sitting in a sauna.
Everyone needs to slow down to hear what’s going on in their brain,” he says.
Book clubs
As an independent bookshop owner and a sauna enthusiast, Kelly Wickson had an inspired idea last year: a book club in a sauna.
Wickson owns Chapter 34 in Shoreham-by-Sea on the Sussex coast, and hosts the sauna book club once a month at the Nomadic Sauna on Kingston Beach.
Creating a phone-free space was a big part of it, and the sauna conveniently ticks that box.
“It will ruin your phone; you’ve got no choice,” she says.
The books are always 250 pages or less, and there’s no commitment to go every month.
Phones are left in waterproof tubs outside the sauna.
The book club is an hour long, and they go in and out of the sauna throughout, with some having a quick dip in the sea during breaks.
Wickson has been amazed at how popular it is.
“We do it on a Friday evening and it sells out,” she says.
While a book club in a sauna is particularly unusual, people increasingly value being given the time and space to switch off and read.
This is the thinking behind Silent Book Club, where one of the mottoes is: “Put down your phone, pick up a book.”
It’s a global network with about 2,000 chapters in more than 60 countries, and there are almost 150 in the UK and Ireland.
Pubs and bars
When Camille Jetzer and James Nasmyth opened the Roses of Elagabalus in Dalston, east London, last year, they knew they wanted to minimise phone use.
They refer to it as a “clubhouse” – there’s a bar, restaurant, dancing and cabaret.
“The idea of having no phones is that you would walk into the Roses, leave the outside world behind and enter this fantasy world where you can just enjoy the moment,” Jetzer says.
When you arrive at the Roses, a host explains that there’s no photography, and places a sticker over your phone camera.
There are also reminders on the menus.
“It’s a ‘you were there or you missed it’ situation,” Jetzer says, who has also noticed their regular punters reminding new visitors about the rule.
While phones aren’t locked away, Jetzer says the stickers on cameras mean they are used less.
“It creates an environment where phones are less desired.
In a dream world, we’d lock away the phones.
That’s maybe next year’s project,” she says.
Elsewhere in London, Esmeralda’s Mayfair and the Spy Bar at Raffles London at the OWO both put stickers on phone cameras.
In 2019, Samuel Smith’s pubs brought in a rule that customers couldn’t use phones or laptops in their establishments, of which there are more than 200 across the country.
At the Barrel at Bude in Cornwall, anyone who breaks its no phones rule has to donate £1, which goes to local charities.
In Herne Bay in Kent, the Butchers Arms has been a phone-free zone since it opened in 2005 – there are no signs needed to enforce it, says owner Martyn Hillier.
“A disgruntled look from other customers is enough.
If that doesn’t work we all start saying, ‘Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb’, louder and louder until they realise they can’t converse any more.”
In Woking, Kim and Mike Jarred run Beyond the Screen, a monthly phone-free social at their local pub the Olive Tree.
They set it up in March 2025 after talking about how they could model good phone habits for their teenage sons.
They provide activities like puzzles and conversation starters, but mostly people just sit and chat.
“Pubs are closing down and we’re just staying in our houses with our phones in front of our faces rather than getting out and meeting people.
We’re human beings, and we need to connect with each other.
Phones are getting in the way of that,” Kim says.
Remote retreats
In 2019, Hector Hughes was working for a tech startup in London and feeling burnt out.
“I ended up at a silent retreat at a Buddhist temple on top of a mountain in the Himalayas.
When you got there, they took your phone off you.
I spent 10 days cut off from the outside world.
It was a revelation,” says Hughes.
He came back from that trip, quit his job and started setting up Unplugged – off-grid cabins in the UK where you lock your phone away.
It launched in the summer of 2020; there are now 60 digital detox cabins around the country (and they have expanded to Catalonia, too).
The phone-free element is self-policed, but each cabin has a lock box with a padlock, and the key is in a sealed envelope.
They provide a Polaroid camera, a map and an old-school Nokia phone in case of emergencies.
Hughes says that Unplugged’s customers often return for regular stays and go on to make changes in their daily lives, like having phone-free date nights or drastically cutting down their screen time.
If you like the idea of escaping to an off-grid cabin and ditching your phone, there are various options around the UK.
Unyoked’s cabins run on solar power, have no wifi and often no phone signal – there’s a “spice signal”, from mild to extra spicy, to set expectations for how remote a cabin feels, and how long it might take to walk to one.
They also have Brick devices, which help you block certain apps from your phone for a set amount of time.
Similarly, Shacks’ cabins are off-grid with no wifi, and lockboxes for phones.
Alternatively, you could look for a remote cottage with no wifi and limited or no phone signal, like the Cottage in the Clouds in the middle of the Lake District national park, or Woodcock Cabin in the Cambrian mountains in Wales.
If you want to escape dry land, too, Lilypod in Devon is a floating retreat with three solar-powered eco pods built on a platform next to a lake, where there’s no TV, wifi or phone signal, but there are board games, beanbags and a king-sized bed.
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