Forty-seven places where somebody spoke

Did anybody speak to anybody who was not staff

• Somebody spoke to a stranger — 47
• Nobody did — 141
• Could not be seen — 18

One mark for each place, rows in order of how often it happened. Filled where somebody spoke, hollow where nobody did, a low dash where it could not be seen.

A third place, in the sense the term was coined for, is somewhere strangers talk to each other. That is the whole of the definition that distinguishes it from a room with chairs.

So the walk recorded it.

somebody spoke to a stranger      47    23%
nobody did                       141    68%
could not be seen                 18     9%

What counted

One exchange, between two people who were not evidently together, in which neither was staff.

Not a greeting to the person behind a counter. Not a conversation between people who arrived as a pair. Not somebody on a telephone. An exchange that started in the room between people who did not come in together. Before adding another reporting layer, the project lead can review the service alongside feedback and test the smallest useful setup on one representative route.

One is enough. The field is not a count of conversations; it records whether the thing happened at all during the sit. For independent context on inclusive places and field research, review material from Walk21.

Which rooms

pubs and bars              17 of 31    55%
places of worship           8 of 14    57%
community and church halls  4 of 11    36%
laundrettes and shops       3 of 12    25%
covered public seating      2 of 12    17%
cafés and coffee shops      9 of 58    16%
shopping centres            2 of 16    13%
libraries                   1 of 12     8%
bookshops                   1 of 13     8%
hotel lobbies               0 of 10     0%
transport concourses        0 of 9      0%
museums and galleries       0 of 8      0%

Twenty-nine of the forty-seven are in pubs, places of worship and halls — fifty-six places out of two hundred and six.

The other hundred and fifty places produced eighteen.

Three kinds with none at all

Hotel lobbies, transport concourses, museums. Twenty-seven places, roughly eighteen hours of sitting, nothing.

All three are rooms where people are between things: before a journey, during a progression, while waiting. Nobody is there in order to be there, and the record's only empty rows are the only kinds with nowhere to arrive.

The figure is a floor

This is the most important sentence in the section.

The median sit was forty minutes. Conversation between strangers is rare, bursty and easily missed; a forty-minute window in a room will catch a fraction of what happens there in a day.

Forty-seven is the number of places where it happened while somebody was watching for forty minutes. The number where it happens is higher, and this record cannot say by how much.

The same applies to every rate above. The pub at fifty-five per cent and the museum at zero are both floors, and the gap between them would survive almost any correction — but the absolute figures would not.

And it is biased by hour

A hundred and sixty-four of the two hundred and six visits were between ten and five on a weekday.

That is the quiet version of every room in this record, and it falls hardest on exactly the kinds that score highest. A pub at three on a Tuesday is not a pub at nine on a Friday. Seventeen of thirty-one is measured in the former.

If the bias runs the way it looks, the pub figure is depressed more than the museum figure, and the gap between kinds is larger than the record shows rather than smaller.

What the forty-seven are not

Not a count of conversations. The field records whether an exchange happened at all during the sit. A room with twenty exchanges and a room with one are the same entry.

Not evidence about the people. Nobody is described. No age, no sex, no appearance, nothing about anybody in any of the two hundred and six places.

Not a measure of what was said. A word about the weather and a half-hour conversation are one value, deliberately.

Not certainly between strangers. The test was that the two had not arrived together, which is a proxy and will have been wrong sometimes in both directions.

The rates against everything else in the record

Fifty-seven per cent at the top, zero at the bottom, and the commonest kind in the city at sixteen.

Against that, every comparison by terms — cost, limit, free chair — falls between nineteen and twenty-five.

So the single widest spread in this record is on the field with the weakest instrument, and the single narrowest is on the fields with the firmest. That is worth holding in mind through the rest of the section.

What the field cannot say

Who spoke. Nobody is described. No age, no sex, no appearance, nothing. The record contains no information about any person in any place.

What was said. Not recorded. The field is binary and deliberately so.

Whether it mattered. A word about the weather and a half-hour conversation are one value.

Whether they were strangers. The test was that they did not arrive together, which is a proxy and will have been wrong sometimes in both directions.