A few weeks ago, one of our black belts caught me at the side of the mat after an adult class and asked, more or less out of curiosity, whether we'd been doing some kind of new marketing for adults. He'd noticed the class was busier. New faces every few weeks. People in their thirties, their forties, their fifties. Some who'd done judo years ago and drifted away. Some who'd never set foot in a dojo before. A noticeable uptick over the last six months that he didn't quite have an explanation for.
I told him, honestly, that we hadn't been doing anything different. The marketing hadn't changed. The classes hadn't changed. Yes, we'd just updated the website — but that wasn't it; the new adults had been arriving long before that went live. The adverts on Facebook, if anything, had been more focused on the children's classes than the adults' over that period. So no — it wasn't marketing. The adults arriving at our adult judo classes in Knaphill, just outside Woking, were arriving under their own steam. Word of mouth. Google searches. A half-remembered conversation with a friend. They weren't being pulled. They were coming.
I've thought about that conversation a lot since. Because I think something is going on, and I don't think it's particular to us. I think we are part of a much wider shift — one that has very little to do with judo specifically, and a great deal to do with what has happened to the lives of adults in this country over the last fifteen or twenty years. And I think it's worth writing down what I believe is actually behind it, because if I'm right, it matters — and not only for us.
The thing British adults are quietly missing
I want to start with a word that might not, at first, sound like it has anything to do with a martial art. The word is infrastructure.
When sociologists try to explain why so many adults in modern Britain describe themselves as lonely, disconnected, or quietly unhappy, the explanation they keep coming back to isn't really about feelings. It's about infrastructure. Specifically, it's about the slow, decades-long collapse of what researchers call third places.
The phrase comes from an American sociologist called Ray Oldenburg, who pointed out in the late 1980s that most adults have two main places they spend their lives — home, which is the first place, and work, which is the second. Everything good in adult life that isn't home or work, he argued, depends on having a third place. A pub. A club. A church. A working men's institute. A community choir. A Sunday-league football team. A boxing gym. A bowls club. An allotment association. Somewhere that isn't your house, isn't your workplace, and isn't transactional — somewhere you go because you like being there, where the same people show up week after week, where you have a role, a place, a sense of belonging that doesn't depend on what you earn or what you produce.
Third places used to be everywhere in Britain. They were the architecture of ordinary adult life. And one by one, over the last thirty or forty years, they have closed.
The numbers, if you go looking for them, are sobering. The UK has lost more than a quarter of its pubs since 2000. Working men's clubs are down by something close to two thirds. Church attendance has collapsed across most denominations. Sunday-league football participation has fallen by more than half. The number of registered amateur sports clubs has dropped year after year for over a decade. And the spaces that replaced them — coffee chains, gyms run as solitary cardio sheds, online communities, food delivery, streaming services — are not third places at all. They are, almost without exception, designed for solo consumption with strangers, not shared participation with familiars.
This matters because the research is now very clear that adult wellbeing — physical, mental, even the boring stuff like cardiovascular health and life expectancy — depends on having regular, repeated, in-person contact with the same group of people over years. The British charity Campaign to End Loneliness reports that nearly half of UK adults — somewhere around twenty-six million people — feel lonely at least occasionally. Nearly four million feel chronically lonely, often or always. The World Health Organization has now formally classified loneliness as a public health crisis. The widely-cited research is that chronic loneliness has effects on the body roughly equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.
And the bit nobody talks about — but which any honest adult reading this will recognise — is that we mostly don't do anything about it. We don't, on the whole, walk into our offices on a Monday morning and tell our colleagues we're lonely. We don't, on the whole, ring our friends up in our forties and say, do you want to start something with me, a regular thing, where we meet every week and do something together? That's not how British adults behave. We absorb the loneliness and carry on. We tell ourselves we're just busy. We assume it'll get better when work calms down or the kids go to university or we retire. It doesn't, usually. The infrastructure has gone, and individual willpower can't replace infrastructure.
This is the wider story I think the new adults arriving at our club are part of.
Why fitness on its own doesn't explain it
I want to be careful here, because the obvious counter-argument is that adults have always come to clubs like ours, and what we're seeing is just a normal year. Maybe. But I don't think so, and here's why.
If the people coming were primarily looking for exercise, they'd be going to the places that promise exercise most efficiently. The big-box gyms charge lower fees than us. The fitness apps charge less still. PureGym in Woking has lower fees than a club like ours, with twenty-four-hour access and far more equipment. If the adults arriving at our door were optimising purely on price, they'd be going there. They're not.
What they say, when I ask them — and I do ask them, because I'm curious about why they've ended up at a judo club rather than somewhere more obvious — is some version of the same thing. They tried the gym. They didn't go. They tried running. It got boring. They tried home workouts. They quit by week six. They tried CrossFit and didn't like the atmosphere, or they tried yoga and didn't feel any better afterwards, or they tried Pilates and found it relaxing but not interesting. Most of them have, in other words, already done the obvious things. They have already tried the fitness-shaped answer to the question they thought they were asking.
What I think is actually going on — and what the third places research suggests is going on — is that they were never asking a fitness question to begin with. They were asking an infrastructure question. They wanted somewhere to go. Somewhere with the same people every week. Somewhere where the activity itself required them to be present, to engage, to learn names, to fall over and get back up in front of other people who would also be falling over. Somewhere where, by accident, they would find themselves part of something.
A gym can't provide this, because the gym is structurally a place of solo activity. Two people side by side on treadmills are not in a community; they are in parallel solitude. An app definitely can't provide it, however good the workouts are. A YouTube channel can't. And — this is the bit that has been quietly clear for years but which the fitness industry will never say out loud — even most fitness classes can't, because the people in them rotate too quickly, the format is too anonymous, and the structure doesn't actually require engagement with anyone else in the room.
The thing we have always tried to build
Here's the part I want to be honest about, because if I leave it unsaid the rest of this piece is less true than it should be.
When I started the club, I didn't know the phrase third place. I had never heard of Ray Oldenburg. I hadn't read the research on adult loneliness or the data on the disappearance of community institutions in modern Britain. I was a coach who wanted to run a good judo club.
But the thing the researchers describe — the same people coming back every week, the engagement, the relationships built sideways through shared activity, the sense of belonging that isn't transactional — that wasn't something I stumbled into. It was something Samantha and I have been trying to build from the day we opened. We've worked hard at it. We learn members' names early. We notice when somebody hasn't been in. We make sure that the new beginner is welcomed properly by the people who've been there longer. We treat the social life of the club — the conversations after class, the trips, the grading celebrations, the WhatsApp group — as core to what we do, not as an extra. We have always believed that the community is the point. Not the side effect. The point.
What I didn't know — what reading the third places research over the last year or so has shown me — is that the thing we were trying to build has a name, a history, and a substantial body of academic research behind it. The structural features we've been engineering by instinct turn out to be the same structural features the researchers say define a healthy third place. We weren't accidentally creating a community in spite of running a judo club. We were intentionally creating a community by using the judo club as the structure through which to do it.
That's a useful distinction, and I want to get it right. Because what I think is happening — what the black belt was picking up on when he asked about the marketing — is that the deliberate work Samantha and I have done to make this club feel like somewhere you belong, repeated across hundreds of small decisions over many years, is now meeting a generation of adults who badly need somewhere to belong. The supply is meeting the demand. We're not the only place in the country doing this kind of work, but there aren't that many of us, and we're well into our second decade of doing it.
So when a new adult walks through the door, they don't just find a judo class. They find a room that has been quietly, intentionally designed for the experience they didn't quite know they were looking for.
The bit specifically about men
I want to write a paragraph or two specifically about men, because the research on what's happened to male adult life in this country is genuinely the bleakest I've read on any of these topics, and I think it explains some of what we're seeing.
The infrastructure that used to give men a third place has been more thoroughly demolished than the equivalent infrastructure for women. The pubs that used to function as social anchors for adult men are largely gone. The working men's clubs are mostly gone. The Sunday-league football is dying. The factory floors where men used to spend forty years next to the same blokes don't exist in most parts of the country anymore. The kind of regular, low-stakes, sideways-facing male friendship — the kind built around an activity rather than a conversation — has lost almost all its scaffolding.
What replaced it, for most men, was nothing. Not "less of the same thing." Just nothing. A 2024 study of UK men found that nearly one in five had not had a meaningful conversation with another man, outside their family, in the previous month. The same study found that the men with the worst measured mental health were almost without exception men who couldn't name a place — physical, regular, in-person — that was theirs.
Men, on the whole, don't reach out the way women do. Men don't, generally, ring each other up and ask if everything's all right. They don't, generally, go for a coffee and a chat. Male friendship has always operated, for better and worse, sideways rather than face-on — built around shared activity rather than direct emotional disclosure. Which means when the shared activity disappears, the friendship disappears with it. The men who lost their league team or their working men's club or their pub didn't replace those things with deeper conversations. They mostly replaced them with nothing.
A judo club is, I think, one of the small number of places where this kind of sideways-male friendship can still happen. Two men gripping each other's lapels and trying to throw each other for sixty minutes are doing something very ancient — something that, if you read the anthropology, men have been doing in some form for ten thousand years. The conversation that happens afterwards in the changing room, or in the pub down the road, or in the WhatsApp group on a Friday evening, is built on the activity, not separate from it. That's how male connection actually works, and it's why a sports club can carry weight in a man's life that a coffee shop or a therapy app or a Zoom call cannot.
I think we are seeing more men in their forties and fifties walk into our adult judo classes in Woking specifically because they are starting to understand, on some level they can't quite articulate, that they have run out of the kind of places where this can happen. They don't necessarily say that. What they say is: I needed to do something. I needed to get off the sofa. My back's playing up. My wife thinks I should. What they mean, underneath, is closer to: I need a place. I need a regular thing. I need to be known by some people who aren't my wife or my kids or my colleagues.
The judo is, for some of them, almost a side effect. They came for one thing and stayed for another.
And the bit specifically about women
I want to be careful here too, because the conversation about the male loneliness epidemic has somewhat overshadowed a quieter but equally important story about adult women. The infrastructure of female friendship has not collapsed in the same dramatic way the male equivalent has — women generally still have closer friendships and more frequent in-person contact than men. But it has changed, and the change is sharpest in the years when women have school-age children, demanding work, and ageing parents all at once.
Women in their late thirties through their fifties often describe their social lives in terms of people I should call but don't. The school-gate network thins out as children get older. Working friendships rarely survive a career change. Old friendships from before the kids were born become harder to maintain as everyone's schedules diverge. And women, more than men, tend to compensate by trying harder — more texting, more catch-ups, more carefully scheduled brunches. Which is exhausting, and which works for a while, but which is not the same as a third place. A third place doesn't require coordination. You just go on the right day at the right time and the people are there.
The women in our adult classes — and women come to our Woking judo club too, not just men — are, I think, partly drawn here for the same underlying reason. Plenty of them come for clear, specific reasons that have nothing to do with loneliness: they want to learn to defend themselves, they want to be stronger, they want to do something physical that isn't running or yoga. But the women who stay — the ones who become part of the club over years rather than weeks — tend to stay because of something they didn't expect when they signed up. They came for the judo. They got a third place.
What I'd tell that black belt now
That conversation by the mat was a few weeks ago. I gave him a fairly short answer at the time — no, we weren't doing more marketing; I wasn't sure why the room was filling up. I've thought about it a lot since, and if he asked me again today, my answer would be longer.
I'd tell him that I think we are doing something genuinely useful, and that the reason the room is filling up isn't a marketing campaign or an algorithm or a lucky run. It's that the deliberate work Samantha and I have put into making this club feel like a community — across thousands of small decisions over many years — is now meeting a generation of adults who badly need somewhere to belong. And a judo club, it turns out, is one of the few places left where that can happen properly.
I'd tell him that we shouldn't be surprised. The research on this is some of the clearest research in modern sociology. Adults need third places. Britain has lost most of its third places. The places that still function as third places — and that are still genuinely welcoming to newcomers — are now disproportionately valuable, even though almost none of them advertise themselves that way.
And I'd tell him that the responsibility this puts on a club like ours is real. It's one thing to run a good judo class. It's another to recognise that, for the adults walking through the door, what we are actually offering is more important than the throws or the gradings or the technical curriculum. We are offering a Tuesday evening that isn't home and isn't work. We are offering names being learned and faces being remembered. We are offering the texture of a life with somewhere to go in it.
That's the thing the black belt was noticing without quite being able to name it. The room is filling up because the thing we have been quietly building, for years, is the thing a lot of adults in 2026 didn't realise they needed until they walked into it.
We're glad they came. We're going to keep building it.
We run adult judo classes at our Woking club in Knaphill — beginners, returners, men and women, from their twenties to their sixties. Most of our adults arrived after trying something else that didn't quite fit.
If you'd like to come and see what it's like, we offer a FREE 14-day VIP pass — three or four sessions, no commitment, no pressure. Long enough to know whether this is the kind of place you've been looking for.
— Vince Skillcorn, Fighting Fitness Judo, Knaphill (Woking)