How to walk this yourself

The whole instrument fits on a card. It took eleven weeks and about a hundred and forty-four hours of sitting.

The sheet

For each place, in this order and no other:

1. What it asks at the door. One of four: nothing; one purchase expected; a purchase roughly every hour; a fee, ticket or membership. If several people repeat the same survey, managers may look through the vendor's explanation while interpreting every record beside completed work and participant feedback.

2. How long I think I can stay. Written at the door, before looking for a notice and before asking anybody. A duration, or unlimited. Readers comparing this walk with broader public-space evidence can also see Scope.

3. How long I actually can. A look for a notice; then, if nothing is found, one sentence to one member of staff. One of three: no limit; a written limit; a limit given on asking.

4. Did anybody speak to anybody who was not staff. Yes, no, or could not be seen.

Plus the kind of place, assigned by the walker from a list of twelve, and the length of the sit.

The one rule about order

Field two is written before field three, at the door, or it is not written at all.

A minute later it is unrecoverable: nobody can honestly reconstruct what they expected before they knew. This rule is the only reason the record has anything to say, and the temptation to bend it arrives in the first week, in the places where the guess turns out embarrassing.

Write the guess down in every place, including the ones where you would rather not.

What to settle before starting

The list of kinds, and whether it may grow. Twelve here, closed, with no other category. Six places fitted none and were excluded rather than swept into a bin, and they are named by kind on the method page.

What counts as a place. Somewhere a stranger may sit who has no business there. That test was added after the walk, which is why the six exclusions are reported rather than hidden: they are the places where you may only be if you have business there.

How long a sit is. Forty minutes was the median here, from twenty to ninety. It is the weakest part of this instrument.

Whether to ask twice. One question, never two. A second turns a report into a negotiation, and the answer moves toward whatever makes the stranger go away.

The three things this walk would do differently

Record the assumption more than once in the same place. At arrival, with a full cup, with an empty one. If the assumption shortens as the cup empties, the mechanism is the drink; if it is fixed from the moment of paying, the mechanism is the transaction. Three readings in forty minutes, costing nothing, and the best idea this record has.

Code by room, not by building. Seven bookshops here contain a café and were counted once. It is the only known coding error that a rule could have prevented.

Count the seats. The seat field is binary: is there somewhere to sit without buying. A library with forty chairs and a concourse with three are one value, and capacity is probably the most useful figure the walk did not collect.

What to publish alongside the counts

Three things, all obligatory under this method.

Every residual at full size. Eighteen unobservable conversations, twenty-one places with nobody to ask, seventy-eight with no assumed duration, six places excluded. None folded into a neighbouring column.

The figures that undermine the premise. This record is about places being read as restricted; its front page carries the fact that a hundred and sixty-eight of two hundred and six restrict nobody. It is also about places where strangers meet; the front page carries the hundred and forty-one where nobody spoke.

Which figures rest on the guess. The limit field is a count of what places say. The assumption field is one person's. Every page using the second says so.

The card, in full

place no. ____    kind ____________    sit ____ min

1  at the door    [ ] nothing
                  [ ] one purchase expected
                  [ ] a purchase roughly every hour
                  [ ] a fee, ticket or membership

2  I think I can stay ______      (write BEFORE looking)

3  I actually can  [ ] no limit found
                   [ ] written: ______
                   [ ] told on asking: ______

4  anybody spoke to a stranger   [ ] yes [ ] no [ ] not visible

Four fields and two numbers. Field two is written at the door or it is not written at all.

What eleven weeks looks like

places visited                   212
excluded                          -6
recorded                         206
hours of sitting           about 144
median sit                40 minutes

Roughly four places a day, three days a week. The limit is not the walking; it is that forty minutes in a room is forty minutes, and two hundred of them is a month of working days spent sitting still.

The two rules that are easy to break

Do not ask twice. One sentence to one member of staff, and accept the answer. A second question turns a report into a negotiation and the answer drifts toward whatever makes the stranger leave.

Do not skip the guess. It is tedious, it is often embarrassing, and it is the only reason the record has anything to say. In the first week the temptation is to write it only where it looks interesting, which is exactly how a field stops meaning anything.

A rule that applies to every entry is the only protection against recording the interesting ones.

What is not worth doing

Naming the places. A list of two hundred and six addresses visited once each for forty minutes would be read as advice, and it would be bad advice.

Scaling up without changing the instrument. Four hundred places at forty minutes each answers nothing that two hundred did not. The questions that remain need a different sheet, not a longer walk.