A hundred and seventeen with no free chair

A hundred and seventeen of the two hundred and six places have nowhere to sit without spending. Fifty-seven per cent.

What they are

cafés and coffee shops               55
pubs and bars                        29
community and church halls            8
hotel lobbies                         7
bookshops                             6
laundrettes and shops with chairs     6
museums and galleries                 3
transport concourses                  3

Eighty-four of the hundred and seventeen are cafés and pubs. Four kinds contribute nothing at all: shopping centres, places of worship, libraries and covered seating, all of which have a free chair in every instance. If several people repeat the same survey, managers may see how records are presented while interpreting every record beside completed work and participant feedback.

So the record splits almost perfectly along one line, and it is the same line as the entry field: places that sell things have chairs that are sold with them, and places that do not, do not. Readers comparing this walk with broader public-space evidence can also see Urban Land Institute.

The overlap with the door

places that ask nothing (71)      free chair in 67   94%
places that ask for money (120)   free chair in 16   13%
places behind a fee (15)          free chair in 6    40%

Ninety-four per cent of the free-at-the-door places have a free chair. Thirteen per cent of the money-at-the-counter ones do.

This is the strongest association in the record between any two fields, and it is nearly a definition rather than a finding: a business with tables is a business whose tables come with service.

The sixteen exceptions

Sixteen places take money at the counter and still have somewhere to sit for nothing.

laundrettes and shops with chairs    5
transport concourses                 3
cafés                                3
hotel lobbies                        2
pubs                                 2
bookshops                            1

The laundrettes are the clearest case and the only one where the free chair is structural: you are waiting for a machine, the wait is the product, and a chair for it is part of what the place is.

The three concourses and two lobbies are rooms where seating serves a purpose unrelated to selling — waiting for a train, waiting for a guest — and the business happens somewhere else in the building.

The three cafés and two pubs are the five waiting benches described in the previous page, and they are exceptions in form rather than substance.

What this does to the city

It means that for somebody with no money, roughly three rooms in five are closed.

Not locked — most of them you can walk into, and in the case of a bookshop or a lobby you can stand in one indefinitely. Closed in the sense that sitting, which is the thing this record is about, requires a transaction.

A stranger with nothing to spend can sit down in eighty-nine places in this city and not in a hundred and seventeen.

That sentence is the plainest statement of access this record produces, and it is the figure most sensitive to the list of what counts as a place.

What it does not do

It does not predict anything else.

conversation, free chair        22 of 89    25%
conversation, no free chair     25 of 117   21%

And on the field that matters most to the idea of a third place, a free chair makes no detectable difference at all.

The hundred and seventeen by kind

cafés and coffee shops      55 of 58    95%
pubs and bars               29 of 31    94%
community and church halls   8 of 11    73%
hotel lobbies                7 of 10    70%
bookshops                    6 of 13    46%
laundrettes and shops        6 of 12    50%
museums and galleries        3 of 8     38%
transport concourses         3 of 9     33%
shopping centres             0 of 16     0%
places of worship            0 of 14     0%
libraries                    0 of 12     0%
covered public seating       0 of 12     0%

Four kinds at zero and two at the ceiling. There is no middle in this field at the level of kinds: a place either has a free chair as a matter of course or it does not have one at all.

What the hundred and seventeen do with time

They are, on average, slightly readier to limit staying than the rest.

free chair (89)        a limit in 12    13%
no free chair (117)    a limit in 26    22%

Nine points, and the whole of it is cafés: nineteen of the twenty-six limits in the no-chair group are in cafés, which are also forty-seven per cent of that group.

Take the cafés out and the two columns are almost identical, which is the usual result in this record whenever a field is crossed with something other than kind.

The thing this field cannot weigh

Whether a free bench is a substitute for a paid table.

Eighty-nine places where a person may sit for nothing, and seventy- seven of those chairs exist for waiting, for the building's own purposes, or alongside some other activity. Twelve exist so that somebody may sit, and all twelve are benches under a roof.

Against that, a hundred and seventeen rooms with a table, warmth, a surface and somebody bringing things, available for the price of a cup.

The record counts both columns and has no way of saying what one is worth against the other, which is the honest end of every page in this section.

The honest qualification

This field is binary and the world is not.

A pew, a bus-shelter bench, an armchair in a lobby and a library reading-room chair are one value. A café with fifty seats, all of them needing a coffee, is one value in the other column.

The field records whether there exists somewhere a stranger could sit without buying. That is a useful line and a crude one, and it is the crudest measure on this site.