“Just a table and an orange hoodie”: The Birmingham host helping tackle loneliness one Monday at a time

A grassroots initiative designed to combat isolation is quietly gaining momentum across the UK — and now it has a regular home in Birmingham.

Empty Chairs is built on a simple idea: a host reserves a table in a pub or café, wears a bright orange hoodie so they’re easy to spot, and leaves a few seats open for anyone who wants to sit down and talk.

Jake Watkins is one of those hosts. He first discovered the initiative in January after seeing it on TikTok. It was set up by Dean Fraser following the death of his best friend Rob, who died by suicide last year. The project began as a way to honour Rob’s memory and create spaces where people could talk openly and feel less alone.

“It was something as simple as liking the idea and liking what it was about,” Jake explains. “I looked at the website and applied. I actually applied to be a host before I even went to one.”

Jake attended his first Empty Chairs event in Birmingham on 26 January — Rob’s birthday, which also happened to be his own.

Since then, he’s hosted four sessions and now runs one every Monday at 7pm in the Selly Oak area.

The format is deliberately low-pressure. There’s no sign-up, no formal structure and no expectation to stay.

“Some weeks you won’t have anyone come and see you,” Jake says. “But even just going down to the pub and separating from work and everything, taking that time for yourself as a host, that can be important.”

Other weeks, strangers pull up a chair.

“You just talk about anything. That’s the best bit — how simple it is.”

Jake moved to Birmingham around 18 months ago from Devon. Like many people relocating for work or study, he found it difficult to build a social circle.

“I myself have been a bit isolated,” he says. “I’ve come over, went into education, been working non-stop. So I don’t have much of a social circle.”

That experience, he says, makes hosting feel personal.

“It doesn’t matter how old or how young you are, there’s that space for you to come over and just have that conversation and make connections with people that you never would have done before.”

Sessions have attracted a mix of students, professionals and older residents. One of the first conversations he remembers was with a woman who had lost her son.

“She was probably two or three times my age, but we still sat there and had a conversation,” he says. “It doesn’t matter who you are — you can be there and talk.”

The orange hoodie — which Jake jokes makes him look “like a traffic cone” — is key.

“Everyone feels they need an invite to have a conversation,” he says. “Whereas Empty Chairs has taken that away. The invite is there for everyone. You know what time it is, you know where it is, and the host wears a bright orange hoodie — and that’s your invite.”

While many sessions are held in pubs, others across the UK take place in cafés and community spaces, making them accessible to people who don’t drink.

Jake admits he was nervous the first time he hosted.

“You’re walking down to the pub thinking, are people going to turn up? What am I going to talk about?” he says. “There’s a couple of minutes that are a bit awkward, but once the conversation gets flowing, you’re okay.”

For him, the impact has been subtle but significant.

“It’s building my confidence, fighting anxiety to talk to people,” he says. “The more you go, it can help with anxiety, help with your confidence. It can have quite big secondary effects.”

At the moment, Jake is the only regular host in Birmingham — something he hopes will change.

“It’s free to host. Anyone can apply on the website,” he says. “The more people wearing that orange, the better.”

His next session will be hosted in Northfield before he returns to Selly Oak the following week — continuing what he hopes will become a small but steady antidote to Monday blues.

“Everyone says Monday is the worst day of the week,” he says. “You get to go to the pub after work, talk to people — it could be a good start to the week instead of a bad one.”