A person travelling on a packed London Tube train will cross paths with somewhere between 500 and 1,500 strangers on a single journey. Most of them would be sitting silently, absorbed in their phones with headphones on, drowning out the din of the train echoing through the tunnels.

Unless one of those passengers is Elsa Weill, who has made it her mission to strike up a conversation with anyone she comes across in her day-to-day life.

The 50-year-old from Lyon, France, has initiated a conversation with people while queuing at a local food market, has opened dialogue with fellow holidaymakers on her travels and has learnt to tango in a class recommended to her by a woman she only met once. 

“I look at every person as a potential encounter,” she told The i Paper. And from that, an idea was born. 

Driven by the desire to connect with people from all walks of life, Ms Weill created Coffee with Strangers, a project that invites individuals to meet and have meaningful conversations with people they would not normally interact with, all over a cup of coffee.

Launched in May, the platform allows people to book a coffee with a registered member, for either an in-person rendezvous or a chat over Zoom. Ms Weill hopes that the more people join the project, the bigger it can grow.

What makes Coffee with Strangers unique from other networking sites, according to Ms Weill, is the spontaneity – when she has tried to make friends through other platforms, she would usually be matched with like-minded people, but Ms Weill felt the encounters were too “transactional”.

“There was always a little bit of a caveat of hoping to get something out of the conversation, some business, or something moving forward,” she said. “And I was just thinking, it would be really nice to meet people for the sheer joy of meeting them.

“If you go without expectation, and you just go for the pleasure of meeting someone, it opens new possibilities, and you branch out from a narrow, rigid way of thinking.

“What I am interested in is actually broadening the kind of interaction we are used to. There is a social media echo chamber where you socialise with people who tend to have the same opinion as you, who have the same kind of reality as you… and that is boring.”

Through Coffee with Strangers, she has been on 50 coffee “dates”. While she spends most of the day working on Unesco education projects and training as a psychotherapist, Ms Weill always tries to find the time to meet with a new person for a coffee every week.

She described her encounters as “random”, but that it was part of the fun. She has met people from Ghana, conversed with strangers in Copenhagen and has been interviewed for a podcast in New Zealand. Some were many years older than her, others were generations younger. A few did not agree with her world view, but all were “joyful, rich experiences”.

“I have met a bunch of fun people and have all kinds of conversations,” she said.

“I spoke to a gentleman who’d lost his wife to cancer, and he was grieving. It was very moving and very touching.

“I met this Italian girl who’s a street busker, she had crazy blue hair. She travels and earns a living by singing on the streets and broadcasting it on TikTok. She had this very carefree and open way of looking at the world, I found it inspiring.”

One of the hosts on the platform is Ronni Gurwicz, 32, whom Ms Weill said was the source of inspiration for Coffee with Strangers. He is halfway through is own project called 1,000 Coffees with Ronni, where he aims to speak to 1,000 strangers over a hot drink.

Mr Gurwicz, from Salford in Greater Manchester, began his journey when he moved to Sweden before the pandemic and wanted to build a community in an unfamiliar place. 

When asked about his most memorable encounter, he described a winter walk through a nature reserve on the outskirts of Malmö with an older Swedish man.

“I tried to start the conversation, and I think I’m pretty good at starting conversations, but I noticed he didn’t want to respond; he’d say something monosyllabic,” Mr Gurwicz recalled. “For the first half an hour, I tried really hard.

“We sat down to have our coffee and sandwiches. It was a beautiful snowy day, looking out over the field, and I thought to myself, you know what? If this is his way of communication, then who am I to push into it?

“So, for the rest of the time, it was mostly silent, we just walked through the snowy forest, and I had a very lovely time. And I hope he did too.”