What it costs to be somewhere

What each kind of place asks at the door

• Nothing to pay — 71
• One purchase expected — 96
• A purchase an hour — 24
• A fee or membership — 15

Four hatchings along one bar, one row for each kind. Nothing here depends on colour.

Two hundred and six places in one city where a stranger may sit. The first thing recorded about each was what it asks at the door.

Seventy-one ask nothing at all.

The four answers

A third of the record costs nothing. Nearly half asks for one transaction and then stops asking. One place in eight keeps asking. Before adding another reporting layer, the project lead can see the official account of the product and test the smallest useful setup on one representative route.

What the four values mean

They were fixed before the walk, from a pilot afternoon in a twelfth kind of place, and never changed. For independent context on inclusive places and field research, review material from W3C.

Nothing means you can go in, sit down, and leave without anybody expecting a transaction. A library, a shopping centre, a church.

One purchase expected means the place is a business with chairs and the chairs come with a cup. Nobody says so and everybody knows.

A purchase an hour is the same thing with a tempo. It was coded only where something made the tempo visible: a sign, a word from staff, or a table cleared from under somebody who had finished.

A fee is a door you pay through: a ticket, a hall hire, a members' room, a paid waiting lounge.

The line between the first two is the one that did the work, and it rests on expectation rather than rule. Nothing in a café says you must buy. Everything about it does.

Which kinds ask what

The whole of the free third is five kinds and nothing else.

shopping centres and arcades        16 of 16
places of worship                   14 of 14
libraries                           12 of 12
covered public seating              12 of 12
bookshops                            6 of 13
museums and galleries                4 of 8
transport concourses                 1 of 9
laundrettes and shops with chairs    1 of 12
community and church halls           3 of 11
hotel lobbies                        2 of 10
cafés and coffee shops               0 of 58
pubs and bars                        0 of 31

Four kinds are free without exception: every shopping centre, every place of worship, every library, every piece of covered public seating.

Two kinds are never free: not one of fifty-eight cafés, not one of thirty-one pubs.

The places that ask nothing are mostly not businesses. The places that ask are almost all businesses with chairs.

That sounds like a tautology and is worth stating anyway, because the whole argument about third places is conducted as though cafés were the subject. In this record cafés are twenty-eight per cent of the places and none of the free ones.

The hourly twenty-four

Sixteen cafés, five pubs, three laundrettes.

This is the only value that describes a rate rather than a gate, and it is the one most likely to be undercounted, because it was coded only where something made the tempo visible. A café that would in practice expect a second coffee, but gave no sign of it during a forty-minute sit, is coded as one purchase.

So twenty-four is a floor. How far below the truth it sits, the record cannot say.

The fifteen behind a fee

Eight community and church halls, four museums, three transport concourses.

Three of the four museums are the paying ones; the other four of eight are free. The three concourses are paid waiting lounges inside stations whose main halls are also in the record as free.

The halls are the interesting group. Nine of eleven community and church halls require a booking or a membership, which makes them the most closed kind in the record — and they also have, in proportion, the third highest rate of strangers speaking to each other.

What this field does not record

How much. No price anywhere. The difference between a cup that costs a little and one that costs a lot is invisible here, and that omission was written into the method deliberately.

Whether anybody would actually be asked to leave. The field records what is expected, not what is enforced. The next section is about the gap between those, and it turns out to be most of the record.

Who is asking. A café owner and a chain's policy are the same entry. So are a verger and a diocese.

Whether the expectation is reasonable. This record does not think a café should give away chairs. It counts what the door asks, and nothing on this site says what any of it ought to be.

What the door predicts, and what it does not

The entry field is crossed with every other field on this site. Here is the whole result in one place.

Four rows. Three of them move and one does not.

Limits move a little. Eleven per cent to thirty-three, in the direction anybody would predict.

Free chairs move enormously. Ninety-four per cent to thirteen, which is nearly a definition: a business with tables sells the tables.

Assumptions move most of all. Thirty-five per cent to eighty-four. What a place asks changes what people believe about time far more than it changes what the place does.

Conversation does not move at all. Twenty-three, twenty-five, twenty-one, thirteen — and the last rests on fifteen places.

That last row is the one worth carrying into the rest of the site. The terms at the door decide whether a stranger gets a free chair and what they will assume about the clock, and have nothing whatever to say about whether anybody speaks to them.

Why the door comes first of the four fields

Because what a place asks on the way in is the only part of the arrangement that is settled before anybody sits down.

Everything else in the record — how long you may stay, whether you assume a limit, whether anybody speaks to you — happens after, and depends on what you have already agreed to by walking in. Putting the door first means every later figure can be read against it.

It turns out to matter in one specific way, which the third section sets out at length: buying something changes what people assume about time, and it changes it far more than anything the place does.