What a chair without a purchase is for

Eighty-nine places in this record have somewhere to sit without spending. Very few of those chairs exist in order to be sat on by somebody who simply wants to sit.

What they are attached to

By the observer's reading of each place, the eighty-nine break down like this:

seating for waiting                     31
seating attached to the main activity   28
seating as part of the building's job   18
seating with no other purpose           12

Twelve places out of two hundred and six have a chair whose only function is that a person may sit in it.

All twelve are covered public seating.

The three larger groups

Waiting: thirty-one. Laundrettes waiting for machines, concourses waiting for trains, lobbies waiting for guests, halls waiting for something to start. The chair exists because the building produces intervals and somebody has to pass them. The workflow described here can be compared with project time data for operational reviews, provided the team states what the information can and cannot demonstrate.

Attached to the activity: twenty-eight. Pews, library chairs, museum benches, bookshop seats. You sit in order to do the thing the place is for, and sitting without doing it is permitted by accident. Additional practical or institutional guidance relevant to the survey can be found at Transport for London.

Part of the building's job: eighteen. Shopping centre benches, mostly. Circulation furniture: a place to stop in a space designed for moving, provided so the space works.

Why this matters for the idea of a third place

Because the third place in its original sense is somewhere you go in order to be there, and almost nothing in this record is that.

chairs for being somewhere          12
chairs for waiting, doing or resting 77

Seventy-seven of the eighty-nine free chairs are incidental to something else. A person using one for its own sake is using it sideways — permitted, unremarked, and not what it is for.

This city provides a great many chairs and twelve of them are for sitting in.

And the twelve are benches under cover, which is to say the least hospitable seating in the inventory: no table, no shelter beyond a roof, no reason to stay beyond the roof itself.

Against the hundred and seventeen

The places with no free chair are not the opposite of this. They are the one category where seating is unambiguously for somebody.

A café chair exists to be sat in by a person who will be there a while. That is its entire purpose. It costs a coffee, and in return it is the only kind of seat in the record designed around somebody staying.

So the record contains two kinds of chair and neither is the one the third-place argument wants:

free, but incidental to something else    77
designed for staying, but conditional     117
free and for sitting                       12

What this does to the free-chair figure

It does not reduce it. Eighty-nine places where a stranger can sit without spending is eighty-nine places, whatever the chair is for, and a person who needs to sit down does not care about the intention.

What it does is explain two other figures in this record.

Why free chairs predict nothing. A chair for waiting produces waiting. Conversation rates among free-chair places are twenty-five per cent against twenty-one — no difference — and that is what you would expect if most of the free chairs are in rooms where people are between things.

Why the phantom rate is not about chairs. Having somewhere free to sit does not tell anybody how long they may be there, because the chair was never a statement about them in the first place.

The twelve, in full

Twelve places in the record have seating whose only purpose is that somebody may sit in it. All twelve are covered public seating.

ask nothing at the door      12 of 12
set no limit                 10 of 12
a written limit               2
assumed to limit              1
phantom limits                2
real limits missed            2
somebody spoke                2

Two of the record's twenty-one written limits are here, and both are the half-hour notices about loitering — the only notices in the walk addressed to a kind of person rather than to a use of a chair.

So the twelve places in this city that provide a seat for its own sake are also the two places that print a rule about who may use one.

Against the seventy-seven

The other free chairs belong to something.

seating for waiting                      31
seating attached to the main activity    28
seating as part of the building's job    18

A person using one of those seventy-seven to sit in for its own sake is using it sideways: permitted, unremarked, and not what it is for.

That is not a complaint. A pew used by somebody who is not praying, a laundrette chair used by somebody with no washing, a shopping centre bench used by somebody not shopping — all three are entirely normal and none is provided for.

What it means is that the city's provision for simply being somewhere, counted strictly, is twelve benches.

Why the grouping is the softest thing on the site

It was made after the walk, from notes, by one person, with no list fixed in advance.

Every other classification here had a vocabulary written before the first entry. This one did not, and it exists because presenting eighty-nine free chairs as a provision would have been misleading in a way the record could see and not measure.

A reader who distrusts it has the kind figures, which are firm, and the twelve, which would survive any recount.

What the field cannot distinguish

The four groups above are the observer's readings, assigned after the walk from the notes, and they are the softest classification on this site — softer than the kind field, which at least followed a list fixed in advance.

They are published because the alternative was to present eighty-nine free chairs as though they were a provision, which they mostly are not. A reader who disagrees with the grouping has the kind figures to work from instead, and the twelve are the only number here that would survive any recount: twelve covered public benches, in a city of two hundred and six places where a stranger might sit.