British Man Marks 1,000th 'Empty Chairs' Pub Meetup Aimed at Fighting Loneliness After Friend's Suicide

A Hoodie, a Chair, and an Open Invitation

Dean Perryman, 30, has spent the past several months walking into pubs wearing a bright orange hoodie, sitting down, and waiting for strangers to talk to him.

He started doing it in December 2025, according to SWNS, about a month after his best friend, Rob Clancy, died by suicide at age 29. Perryman, who lives in Stratford in East London, said he wanted to make sure nobody else ever felt as alone as Clancy might have.

"When I started it came from such a place of sadness," Perryman told SWNS. "To see how this simple idea has been able to help so many people has been really nice."

The project, called Empty Chairs, held its 1,000th meetup a few weeks ago in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, with around 12 people showing up, Fox News reported.

From One Table to Multiple Continents

Perryman works for Chicken Rush, a team-building game company, and used its social media following to spread the idea, according to SWNS. What began as a handful of gatherings in London and Essex has since expanded to Manchester, Bedford, Cambridge, Skegness, Gloucester, Leeds, York and Wrexham.

The concept has also crossed borders, with events now planned in Colombia, Spain, the United Arab Emirates and Australia, per both SWNS and Fox News. Perryman told SWNS he's personally attended 61 of the meetups himself and has roughly 200 more already lined up.

There's no formal structure or screening process. "There really isn't a barrier to entry," Perryman said. "Whoever needs the space is welcome to come."

He told SWNS the crowd is deliberately mixed: men, women, young, old, with no typical attendee. Some come because they need someone to listen. Others show up because they have the capacity to listen to someone else. "Everyone shares their own story, but it stays at the table," Perryman said.

The Model and Its Limits

Sitting down with a stranger in a pub is not a substitute for professional mental health care, and Perryman doesn't claim it is.

Empty Chairs is peer support, not clinical treatment. Nobody running these meetups is a licensed therapist, and there's no vetting of who walks through the door. For someone in acute crisis, a conversation over a pint is not a stand-in for a suicide-prevention hotline or a psychiatrist. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can be reached at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK for anyone having thoughts of suicide.

Perryman is offering something narrower and, for a lot of people, harder to find: a low-stakes, no-appointment-necessary chance to talk to another human being who showed up specifically to listen. Whether that model scales safely as it spreads to new countries with volunteer hosts Perryman hasn't personally trained is an open question the campaign hasn't yet had to answer at scale.

No Government Grant, No Committee

Empty Chairs operates without a government loneliness task force behind it, without a six-figure nonprofit budget, without bureaucracy. It's one grieving man in an orange hoodie, a company's Instagram following, and volunteers willing to host a table in their own towns.

This kind of grassroots, person-to-person response tends to move faster than institutional programs precisely because it doesn't wait for anyone's permission. Perryman told SWNS he has no plans to stop, with roughly 200 more meetups already on the calendar.

Whether the model holds up as it grows past its founder's direct involvement, particularly in countries where he isn't personally recruiting or vetting hosts, remains untested.