Seventy-one that ask nothing

Seventy-one of the two hundred and six places ask nothing at all. No ticket, no purchase, no membership, nothing expected on the way in or on the way out.

That is a third of the record, and it is a larger third than most people guess.

Where the seventy-one are

Four kinds are free without a single exception. Fifty-four of the seventy-one come from those four, and the remaining seventeen are scattered thinly across six more. The workflow described here can be compared with operational evidence for public-space audits, provided the team states what the information can and cannot demonstrate.

Not one café. Not one pub.

The four that are free throughout

Shopping centres and arcades: sixteen of sixteen. Every one has seating, every one is open to anybody, and none asks for anything. The most commercial places in the record are the ones that ask least. Additional practical or institutional guidance relevant to the survey can be found at Google Maps.

Places of worship: fourteen of fourteen. Open doors, chairs or pews, nothing collected from somebody sitting.

Libraries: twelve of twelve. The clearest case, and the one everybody already knows about.

Covered public seating: twelve of twelve. Bus shelters, arcade benches, a roofed corner of a square. Free by construction.

Fifty-four free places, and fifty-two of them exist because somebody decided a city needs places to be. The other two are shops.

That is the finding under the finding. The free third of this record is almost entirely civic, religious or municipal, and the commercial sector contributes a shopping centre's benches.

Why the shopping centres count

A reader may object that a shopping centre is not a place to be but a corridor between shops, and that its seating exists to keep people spending.

The record has no view on the motive, and the field asks only what is required at the door. By that test a shopping centre asks nothing: you may sit on its bench all afternoon having bought nothing, and sixteen of sixteen were coded that way.

What the record can add is that it is also one of the quietest kinds in the inventory — two of sixteen had anybody speaking to a stranger — and one of the most limited: four of the sixteen have a written limit on staying, which is the highest written-limit rate of any kind.

So the shopping centre asks nothing and permits least. That combination appears nowhere else.

The bookshops, split six and seven

Thirteen bookshops. Six expect nothing; seven expect a purchase.

The split is almost exactly the split between the kinds that have chairs by the shelves and the kinds that have a counter with coffee at the back. The record does not distinguish those two in a field, and in hindsight it should have, because a bookshop with a café in it is two places under one roof and was counted as one.

That is the clearest coding failure in this field, and it affects seven entries.

What free does not mean

It does not mean welcome. Nothing about asking for no money says anybody is glad you are there. Eight of the seventy-one free places do set a limit on staying, and of the sixty-three that do not, twenty-two were assumed to.

It does not mean comfortable. The field records the terms, not the chair. Twelve of the free places are covered public seating, which is to say a bench.

It does not mean open. Hours are not recorded anywhere in this inventory, and several of the free places — the halls especially — are open for a few hours a week.

It does not mean sociable. Of the seventy-one, sixteen had somebody speak to a stranger. That is twenty-three per cent, which is exactly the rate across the whole record. Costing nothing makes no difference at all to whether anybody talks.

Free and limited at once

Eight of the seventy-one free places do set a limit on staying.

written down          7
said when asked       1

Seven written limits is the highest concentration anywhere in the record: of the twenty-one written limits in the whole walk, a third are in places that charge nothing at all.

That is not the shape anybody would predict. The places that take your money mostly say nothing about time; the places that take nothing are the readiest to put up a notice.

The explanation is probably ownership rather than generosity. A shopping centre, a library and a bus shelter all belong to somebody who has to manage a crowd and has no transaction to manage it with. A sign is the only instrument they have.

What the free third costs to maintain

Nothing the record can see, and that is worth saying plainly.

No price was collected anywhere, so this site cannot weigh a library against a café or say what a bench costs a council. The seventy-one are counted and described, and the question of what maintains them falls outside the four fields entirely.

What the record can say is that the free third is concentrated in exactly the kinds most often described as under pressure — libraries, halls, municipal seating — and that in one city, in one season, there were seventy-one of them, and nobody was asked for anything at the door of any.

What it does mean

That in one city, a third of the places where a stranger can sit down require nothing of them.

Set against the account in which public space is vanishing and everything has been turned into a purchase, that is a figure pointing the other way, and it is on the front page of this site rather than here.

The honest qualification is that this is one city, one season, and one list of what counts as a place. Change the list — drop shopping centres, say, on the grounds that they are private property — and the free third becomes a free quarter.