Sometimes it’s hard to be a young woman. City life is relentless: there are work pressures, home pressures and the worry of constantly updating one’s Facebook profile.

The answer, according to thousands of young people in cities across the country? Join the Women’s Institute.

In the upstairs rooms of pubs in New Cross and Borough, South London, they gather to knit. In lofts in Shoreditch and Islington, London, they cross-stitch. In universities up and down the country, they learn crafts their grandmothers knew, all drawn by a common cry: modern life is stressful, let’s make chutney!

The phenomenon of the urban Women’s Institute was first noted in 2005, when a group of young ladies in Fulham, West London, began meeting every month. The next year there was a group in Islington called N1WI. The Shoreditch Sisters formed in 2007, sparking copycat WIs in Leeds and Manchester. A network of university WIs is now forming, with branches at Goldsmiths College and King’s College London, and in Newcastle upon Tyne, Sheffield, Birmingham and Reading.

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An investigation into what drives the new urban WIs suggests that it is the jam-making, crocheting and even darning that draws members. The very crafts that WIs have taught since 1897 are suddenly attractive.

Kirsty McCaskill, 26, a civil servant who lives in South London, said: “I’m not saying that life in the 1950s wasn’t stressful, but young women have so much to worry about these days. Things used to be simpler. You wouldn’t have a Facebook account to keep constantly updated.

“Sometimes you just want to make chutney,” said Miss McCaskill. “Or learn how to cross-stitch. It’s nice to look forward to doing something simple with your hands, without having to be stimulated all the time. To feel like your grandma would have felt when she sat down and had a tea and went about her domestic duties.”

Miss McCaskill is president of the Borough Belles, and a former member of the Shoreditch Sisters, a WI set up by Jazz Domino Holly in 2007. She left to form her own WI after attending a meeting that was so crowded that she could not find a chair.

Miss Holly puts the success of the Shoreditch Sisters down to a revival in interest in traditional crafts. “We had so many young girls calling us and saying, ‘I have just moved into the area and I really want to learn how to knit’. The recession also gave us a boost.” Soon she had 100 members. “It was a rural organisation for women who were isolated. But people in cities now are isolated, too.”

At this week’s meeting of the King’s College WI, 20 women sat at tables learning how to make jewellery and spoke of the joys of meeting each other in actual physical locations.

Holly Thompson, 21, a theology student, said: “You’re on your BlackBerry or your iPhone the whole time. If there is an opportunity to talk to people in real life, that’s appealing.” Jenny Parker, 18, an English student from South London, said: “People don’t go to youth clubs any more — there is nothing like this around.”

A few said that their parents were worried. One feared that her daughter would become a Young Conservative.

At the end of the evening, Jade Landers, 19, a medical student from southeast London, put on her home-made bracelets and went to leave. “I’m going to the Black Eyed Peas after a party at the Ministry of Sound,” she said. “It’s a pretty random evening.”

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