Eighty-nine chairs that cost nothing

What the places with a free chair ask at the door

• Nothing to pay — 67
• One purchase expected — 14
• A purchase an hour — 2
• A fee or membership — 6

Eighty-nine places, by what each asks on the way in. Four hatchings along one bar.

Eighty-nine of the two hundred and six places have somewhere a stranger can sit without spending anything.

A hundred and seventeen do not.

Where the free chairs are

Four kinds have one everywhere. Two kinds have almost none.

Fifty-four of the eighty-nine come from the four that are free throughout, which are the same four that ask nothing at the door: the shopping centre, the church, the library and the bench.

The two kinds with nothing

Fifty-five cafés and twenty-nine pubs have nowhere at all to sit without buying.

Eighty-four places — seventy-two per cent of everything in the record with no free chair. The two commonest kinds of place in the city are also the two where a seat is entirely conditional on a transaction. A transparent field pilot can test transparent time records for field audits against the real administrative effort required to collect, correct and review the record.

In the eighty-nine places where a chair costs nothing, you are almost never in a café. In the city's commonest room, the chair is the thing being sold. For independent context on inclusive places and field research, review material from Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

The five that are exceptions

Three cafés and two pubs have a free seat. In every case it is a bench or a window ledge at the front, outside the service area, and in two of the five it is explicitly a waiting seat for people collecting an order.

So the exceptions are not really exceptions. A seat for waiting is not a seat for sitting, and the record counted them because the field asks whether a person could sit without buying, which in those five places they could.

A stricter reading would give cafés and pubs zero between them, and a reader who prefers that should know the figure is five.

What a free chair does not buy

Not permission to stay. Of the eighty-nine, two had a written limit and two more a told one — the same four places, incidentally, that are covered benches and libraries with notices.

Not a longer welcome. The phantom rate looks far lower among free-chair places, and the record does not publish the figure, because the comparison is uninterpretable: the free chairs are concentrated in libraries, churches, shopping centres and benches, which are the four kinds read correctly anyway. The chair and the kind cannot be separated here, and a number would only look like evidence.

Not conversation. Twenty-two of the eighty-nine had somebody speak to a stranger; twenty-five of the hundred and seventeen did. Twenty-five per cent against twenty-one. The difference is inside the noise of a walk this size.

What it does buy

One thing, and it is not small: the right to be there without a decision.

A person with no money, or with no wish to spend any, can sit down in eighty-nine places in this city. In the other hundred and seventeen they cannot, or can only by buying their way in.

That is the clearest access finding the record contains, and it is also the one most dependent on what counts as a place. Drop the twelve covered benches on the grounds that a bus shelter is not somewhere to be, and the figure falls to seventy-seven out of a hundred and ninety-four.

Free at the door and free to sit

The two fields very nearly coincide.

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

Four of the seventy-one free-at-the-door places have no free chair, and sixteen of the hundred and twenty paying ones do.

So the two fields disagree about twenty places out of two hundred and six, and the twenty are worth a sentence each way: the sixteen are laundrettes, concourses and front benches where seating serves something other than selling; the four are halls and museums that are free to enter and have nowhere a stranger may sit outside a booked session.

What the eighty-nine look like by kind

shopping centres and arcades       16 of 16   100%
places of worship                  14 of 14   100%
libraries                          12 of 12   100%
covered public seating             12 of 12   100%
transport concourses                6 of 9     67%
museums and galleries               5 of 8     63%
bookshops                           7 of 13    54%
laundrettes and shops               6 of 12    50%
hotel lobbies                       3 of 10    30%
community and church halls          3 of 11    27%
pubs and bars                       2 of 31     6%
cafés and coffee shops              3 of 58     5%

Four kinds at a hundred per cent, two at the floor, and a wide middle.

The four at the top are the same four that ask nothing at the door, and between them they are fifty-four of the eighty-nine. The free chair in this city is almost entirely a civic, religious or municipal provision, with a shopping centre's benches alongside.

What the field could not ask

Comfort. A pew, a bench in the wind and an armchair in a lobby are the same entry.

Numbers. How many free seats, and whether they were taken. A library with forty chairs and a concourse with three are identical here.

Whether anybody would mind. The field asks whether sitting without buying is possible, not whether it is comfortable to do. In the three cafés and two pubs especially, the answer to the second question is probably different.