Attention is a hot commodity. While opening the latest Lost Property – a night of short, miscellaneous lectures held in East London – host Letty Cole acknowledges this, and suggests that paying attention could be a “spiritual experience to stretch towards”. Chairs are scarce and tickets are completely sold out for the sixth edition of the event, suggesting that there are at least 100 of us here tonight who feel the same. 

Lost Property is the brainchild of Cole, a writer and journalist. It was born out of her frustration at young people having so few spaces outside of traditional educational institutions to explore their intellectual interests in the company of others, and, vitally, away from their phones. “I wanted to create a space where people could learn and be really nerdy and be curious and be excited about the world,” Cole tells Dazed. 

It’s also an alternative to London’s booming literary scene, which Cole feels can sometimes be “one-sided,” as events tend to focus on readings where a writer reads their work and then moves on. “I really wanted to create a space where people could have more of a two-way dialogue and speak about non-fiction, too – to create a space of curiosity and interest in the world.”

The event has a tight format: there are four ten-minute lectures, which can be on any topic at all. The lectures are billed as “rabbit holes and obsessions from your favourite thinkers, artists, lovers and friends,” and make a point of embracing their amateurishness. “You’re not allowed to self-promote or talk about work,” says Cole. “We want to keep it as collaborative and non-commercial as possible.”

Speakers so far have included co-creator of club collective Fetchish, Zlata Mechetina, founder of lesbian bar La Camionera, Alex Loveless, PinkPantheress’ choreographer Anjelica Wolanska, and more. Lecture topics have included frogs and the River Thames, celebrity gossip, and bull fighting. In the last edition, held on February 25, I heard lectures on the club as a heterotopia by Bee Beardsworth, the proliferation of love scams by Alex Quicho, the places spontaneity can take you by Tevin Muendo, and – my favourite – Nimrod Kamer on prediction markets. 

“Lost Property is about rejecting the loneliness and nihilism that I think a lot of us can feel in today’s world,” says Cole. “By celebrating random, niche interests, we try to encourage people to engage positively with the world around them again. Especially with the physical world, because it’s all we’ve got.” The concept is interesting, and it does exactly what it intends to. It invites curiosity, not just about the world, but about the audience’s own interests, too. Even before the lectures began, I found myself considering what I’d like to talk about, if given the chance – what do I know about? What do I care about? How would I tell it? 

This is entirely the point. “It’s a driver for idea generation and creativity that our phone screens just can’t replicate,” says Cole. “I speak a lot about the difference between solitary, digital learning, and learning as an embodied, collective pursuit. The latter is so much more emotionally and intellectually powerful.” In this sense, Lost Property acts as a tonic to our digital world, where we are hit with innumerable topics all at once, stunning us into passivity. The intentionality of going to a physical space and feeling the energy of the room feels like a genuinely fresh way for young people to engage with information. 

It’s a driver for spontaneity and idea generation and creativity, that our phone screens just can’t replicate

Of course, the digital world cannot be fully escaped – Lost Property is both an antidote to, and a symptom of, its time. Some audience members couldn’t resist the pull of Instagram Stories mid-lecture. Many of the speakers referenced memes and used online slang in their lectures. The short-form and hotch-potch nature of the lectures was reminiscent of scrolling through TikTok (sans the feeling I was being funnelled to some dark ideological place). But arguably, all this makes Lost Property the perfect bridge from endless scrolling to more intellectual pursuits: I sometimes found myself yearning for more time, more depth on certain topics, but ultimately these lectures stayed with me in a way that a TikTok explainer or Instagram Reel decidedly does not.

Cole doesn’t deny this algorithmic quality to the events. “The algorithm that we experience on our screens is interesting because we get to experience a variety which mirrors the real world,” she says, explaining that she is actively trying to “replicate” this infinite variety in the Lost Property lectures “to create a sense of the chaos and randomness that makes the physical world so magical in the first place.” What’s different, and what’s important, is hashing out these talking points in a real-life setting: “This is what enables us to critically, creatively, and socially engage with it, and have a lot more fun with it.”

Moreover, Lost Property is just a good space to meet new, interesting people. “The very act of sitting in a room with loads of people that you don’t know and listening to four people speak about a subject that they’re really interested in, no matter what it might be, is such an amazing catalyst for making friends,” says Cole. On the night I attended, she invited the audience to speak to people they didn’t know throughout the evening. I was there alone and noticed a handful of other solo attendees, who I soon got chatting to.

The range of topics, the accessibility of the format and the cheap drinks mean Lost Property has the power to pull in a wide range of people and collapse echo chambers in the process. It’s an admirable venture, encouraging everyone to, as Cole puts it, “be enchanted by the world at a time when we need it most”.