London venues are stickering cameras and locking away phones to prioritise experience over content
Smartphone ownership is near universal in the UK, with 95% of Brits (and 98% – 99% of people aged 16-54) owning one – and boy do we love ‘em. We spend an average of 3 hours and 21 minutes a day on our devices, which is more time than we spend watching TV. Phone usage, driven by social media, is reshaping the way we exist, from how we receive information to how we live experiences.
Meals, gigs, holidays, anywhere you can go and anything you can do becomes content. They are memories to be captured and stored on a phone rather than in your brain; they are signals to be broadcast to the rest of the world. If you didn’t post it, did it even happen? Have you been to a gig or a festival unless you’ve watched a performance through a sea of screens held aloft in front of you?
Nightclubs have been leading the pushback against phones for years in an effort to protect the dance floor as a place of freedom and self-expression. Berghain, like most Berlin clubs, famously has a no phones policy, and Pikes Ibiza introduced one in 2024. In London, FOLD and Fabric have long banned photos, with Fabric even giving someone a lifetime ban after filming another clubber and mocking them on social media. New nights, like Lost, run out of the old Odeon cinema in Covent Garden, and Open Monday, run by Brawn founder Ed Wilson in Dalston, have followed suit.
Now pubs, bars and restaurants are getting in on the phone-free action to help their customers remain in the present moment. The French House famously doesn’t have phones, music or TV inside, making it, by its own admission, “a haven for conversationalists”. As well as leaning into its espionage theme, Spy Bar at The OWO has banned phone photography to allow guests to focus on the experience. For Farringdon hi-fi bar Space Talk, the mission is to create a community for people with a genuine interest in discovering music, going so far as to state that “Space Talk is not a space to see and be seen, our goal is to distance ourselves from social media and everything that comes with it and encourage members to live in the moment.”
Queer clubhouse Roses of Elagabalus has had a no photos policy from the outset. It was a conscious decision from founders James Nasmyth and Camille Jetzer to allow the venue to be an antidote to the stress of the real world. As they say, “The Roses of Elagabalus is not a space to share on social media but rather a space of fantasy, a place to enter and lose yourself in.” It also helps encourage exploration as “not being able to document the space systematically as a guest means you take it in differently, maybe you notice changes from visit to visit, or maybe you just enjoy being able to relax into the comfort of not feeling the need to arrange and pose in front of the many mirrors.” Esmerelda’s Mayfair, the brand new, NY-inspired late-night lounge at the Mandarin Oriental, has cocktails by Anna Sebastian and a no photos rule.
Punk Royale has had a no phones policy since it opened earlier this year, where your phones are locked away so you can fully immerse yourself in the madcap dining experience. For co-founder Katherine Bont, phones can “create a layer of distance and distraction. With no phones this allows the room to exist in the moment.” She’s found that the response has been “surprisingly positive – sometimes even emotional. There’s nothing better than hearing from someone at the end of the evening that they felt connection in a different way. The whole energy in the room shifts completely when no one is distracted behind a screen.” We visited and honestly it was pure escapism; of course that’s partially down to the food, music, decor and service but being “offline” when the news is all doom and gloom is pretty nice.
Whatever the driving force behind it, venues going “offline” certainly helps to build a sense of curiosity and exclusivity. The fact that The Dover launched with no online reservations system, let alone the typical foodie influencer blitz (you can now book online but the only thing on its IG page is the logo), only made the restaurant buzzier when it first opened.
It’s not something that can work for all restaurants though; as jarring as it can be eating next to someone with a full tripod and ring light set up, there’s no doubt that social media can drive footfall. The push-pull between marketing value and vibe protection is something many chefs and restaurateurs are having to grapple with. Camille and James of Roses of Elagabalus acknowledge that the lack of photography “probably slowed down our growth at the beginning but we feel it allowed our regulars to find us organically and create a stronger connection to The Roses”, receiving only positive feedback from customers so far. For Katherine, word of mouth has been powerful for Punk Royale as “the experience becomes something you have to be a part of to understand, and that mystery works in a positive way.”
If more venues go down the no phones route, will we see what Daniel Alexis calls the “bifurcation of party culture” expand further? He argues that we’re seeing a divide when it comes to nightclubs; “the Content Palace, where the phone is the guest of honor, and the Sanctuary, where pulling out a camera is social suicide.” Will there be more venues built for social media, where the events are designed to be documented? Or will we see an increase in spaces that promise discretion and digital disconnection?
What we do know is that the “photo-taking- impairment effect”, where taking a photograph of something actually makes you remember it less, is real. So, for the things you truly want to remember – put that phone down.
