A hundred and forty-one where nobody did

In a hundred and forty-one of the two hundred and six places, nobody spoke to a stranger while somebody was there to see it.

Sixty-eight per cent.

Where the silence is

cafés and coffee shops      46 of 58
pubs and bars               11 of 31
shopping centres            12 of 16
bookshops                   11 of 13
libraries                   10 of 12
covered public seating       9 of 12
hotel lobbies                9 of 10
laundrettes                  8 of 12
transport concourses         8 of 9
museums and galleries        8 of 8
community halls              5 of 11
places of worship            4 of 14

Forty-six silent cafés is a third of the whole silent group, which is what being the commonest kind does. A team converting this walk into repeatable fieldwork can compare the tool with the written policy before choosing which time and project records are genuinely necessary.

By rate the order is nearly inverted: museums are silent in eight cases out of eight, concourses in eight of nine, lobbies in nine of ten, bookshops in eleven of thirteen. For wider research on public space, access and how places are used, consult City Observatory.

What the silent rooms have in common

Reading the twelve kinds rather than counting them, three things recur.

People are there in parallel. A library, a museum, a concourse and a bookshop are rooms where everybody present is doing the same thing separately. There is no occasion that includes the room.

Nobody has arrived. Lobbies, concourses and shopping centres are places between places. A person on a bench with shopping bags is not somewhere; they are resting on the way.

The activity absorbs the attention. A book, a screen, a train departure board. In nine of the twelve kinds, the thing a person is doing points away from the room.

None of that is measured. The record has four fields and none of them is about attention, occasion or arrival. These are readings of notes, offered as readings.

What the silence is not caused by

Three candidates the record can test, and all three fail.

Not cost. Free places are silent at sixty-six per cent, single-purchase places at sixty-eight, hourly ones at seventy-one and fee places at eighty. No pattern.

Not rules. Places with no limit are silent at sixty-eight per cent, places with a written limit at seventy-one, told at sixty-five. No pattern.

Not seating. Places with a free chair are silent at sixty-five per cent, places without at seventy-one. Six points on eighty-nine and a hundred and seventeen.

Everything the record can measure about a room's terms is unrelated to whether anybody speaks in it.

What the silence does to the category

It is the finding that cuts hardest against this site's own subject.

The phrase third place was coined for somewhere that is neither home nor work and where strangers talk. On that test, a hundred and forty-one of the two hundred and six places walked for this record are not third places at all. They are rooms with chairs.

And the two kinds that pass the test most clearly — the pub at fifty-five per cent and the place of worship at fifty-seven — are the two that almost nobody has in mind when the phrase is used. The café, which is what people mean, passes it sixteen times in fifty-eight.

The floor, once more

A hundred and forty-one is a count of places where nothing was seen in a median of forty minutes.

It is an overcount of silence for the same reason that forty-seven is an undercount of speech. Both numbers move in the same direction under any correction, and the direction is toward more conversation everywhere.

What would not move much is the order of the kinds. A museum watched for four hours would still be quieter than a pub watched for forty minutes, and that comparison is the part of this section worth keeping.

Silence by kind, in order

museums and galleries     8 of 8     100%
transport concourses      8 of 9      89%
hotel lobbies             9 of 10     90%
bookshops                11 of 13     85%
libraries                10 of 12     83%
cafés and coffee shops   46 of 58     79%
covered public seating    9 of 12     75%
shopping centres         12 of 16     75%
laundrettes               8 of 12     67%
community halls           5 of 11     45%
pubs and bars            11 of 31     35%
places of worship         4 of 14     29%

Nine of the twelve kinds are silent in three quarters of their places or more.

The café at seventy-nine per cent sits in the middle of that group, alongside the library and the bookshop — which is the comparison worth sitting with, since one of those three is routinely described as a social institution and the other two are not.

What the silence costs the record

It is the finding that most needs the longest sit, and the one that got the shortest.

A hundred and forty-one is a ceiling, not a count. Every correction — longer sits, evenings, weekends, busier hours — moves places out of this column and into the forty-seven, and none moves them the other way.

The figure the record is least able to defend is also the figure it most wants to be wrong.

What survives any correction is the order of the kinds. A museum watched for four hours would still be quieter than a pub watched for forty minutes.

The eighteen that could not be seen

Not in either column.

Eighteen places where the room's layout, occupancy or noise made it impossible to say whether anybody had spoken to anybody. They have a page of their own, because folding them into the silent column would have turned a hundred and forty-one into a hundred and fifty-nine and made the finding look firmer than it is.