Hacker houses in the UK

A selected group shares one house for seven days. You bring the work you already have — the company, the product, the research, the next chapter — and you keep doing it. Days stay open for deep work and calls. The edges of the day do the rest: meals, walks, demos, and the local rooms that are actually worth visiting.

This is the opposite of a retreat. You do not pause your life to attend. It is also the opposite of a UK networking evening that resets every time you leave the venue. Living together gives the week a memory. You meet someone, bring the thread back to the house, compare notes, and turn one conversation into a useful next step.

Before the week starts, accepted members get an operating pack: cohort context, house norms, a draft agenda. The point is to arrive with a clearer ask, not to spend Monday introducing yourself from zero.

You can read the fuller format on what is a hacker house, and the design choices in the SOTI house model.

A lot of UK founders cannot step out of a company, a raise, or a shipping cycle for six or eight weeks. A week is a different decision. It is long enough for trust to compound, and short enough to fit around real work. That is why SOTI treats one week as a feature, as we argued in why live together for one week while building.

London, especially, already has density: operators, technical builders, early-stage teams, people who move between the UK and the rest of Europe. A one-week house is a way to use that density without turning it into another conference. The room is curated on purpose. Requesting a spot is not a ticket purchase, and acceptance depends on fit.

SOTI has not announced a UK or London edition. This page explains the format for people searching from the UK. When an edition is public, it will be on the site. Until then, UK founders join a public house the same way everyone else does.

Two results get in the way of a clean search.

The first is hacker.house, a cybersecurity company. If you landed here looking for security training or a cyber product, this is not that.

The second is the wider market of houses and write-ups around London. Other people run houses; UK coverage sometimes talks about them. That is context, not a SOTI partnership, and not a reason for us to invent a London address. SOTI House is the one-week community project at soti.house. It is also not SOTI Inc. at soti.net, a different company with no affiliation to us.

And if what you wanted was a long founder residency or an accelerator, those are different jobs. An accelerator takes equity and runs a curriculum. A months-long residency asks you to relocate. SOTI does neither. The comparison is spelled out in founder residency vs accelerator vs retreat.

SOTI has not announced a UK edition. Other people do run houses in London, usually on a longer clock than one week.

London Founder House is a London hacker house and residency for founders, with a public events calendar as well as residents.

The Residency runs live-in programs in London for deep-tech founders and researchers. The official page describes a three-month stay, paid in equity or cash, with prices varying by room and city.

Project Motherboard is a residential founder house in St John's Wood for female founders building in tech-for-good. Intake is rolling; a one-year stay is the priority, and shorter stays exist.

Lift House is a six-storey founder townhouse in London: a residence first, with dinners and sessions around it.

Two time-bounded programs are also public: StrandHouse is a rent-free student-founder residency in South Kensington, dated 11 July to 11 September 2026 on the official page, and BaseJump lists a three-month London cohort for winter 2026.

If the format you want is one week of living and working together, not a term-long stay, that is the SOTI model. UK founders join a public SOTI house the same way everyone else does.

The public SOTI weeks you can read about today are Barcelona 2025 and San Francisco 2026. The San Francisco edition, in particular, was built as a European builder cohort spending focused time in the Bay Area — which is often relevant if you are based in the UK and already think across both sides of the Atlantic. There is a short recap in San Francisco proved the product is proximity.

For the wider European picture — including France, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Italy and Spain — see hacker houses in Europe.

If the week sounds like yours, request a spot in a SOTI house. Tell us what you are building and why the room would be better with you in it. Acceptance depends on the edition and on the group being built. The house only works if the people in it do.