Where can we hang?
The problem with third places
Really Good Tomatoes asks irreverent questions and offers hopeful answers. It’s a newsletter about culture, behaviour, food, art, relationships, pleasure, politics, work, environment, identity, and society. For people who refuse to be fobbed off with crap tomatoes.
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I shall interpret silence as a sign of not giving a single fuck so even those of you too lazy to click a button will still get counted. <3
“I’m sorry but you can’t let your kids run around in here.”
We were in the pub on our local high street. Not a particularly fantastic pub, but the only one big enough to guarantee space for two families, each with two children, at 5pm on a Saturday. For a while we’d managed to keep the kids (two two-year-olds, a three-year-old and a seven-year-old) busy with desiccated fish fingers and a plate of wizened chips, but the food was now finished, or else abandoned, and we had been unable to contain them any longer. That it was aggravating the staff was entirely understandable. And why should other customers have to put up with it? A pub is not a playground. Unfortunately, the actual playground has a wind chill factor of 5 centigrade. Also they don’t sell beer, and it’s a little bit frowned upon to turn up with a six pack.
Apologising, we scooped up our respective brood and made for the exit. “Maybe next time we should just do this at one of our houses?” I suggested to our friends on the way out. They grudgingly agreed.
I have no interest in debating whether our experience was fair. There are people with strong views about how welcoming, or not, spaces such as (but not limited to) pubs should be to children. All I know is that, now that I have kids, there isn’t really anywhere I can go. The options for a child-friendly hangout with friends outside of the home amount to one: the park. In winter that number dwindles to zero.
Granted, we could host at home. But as a freelancer and a mum-of-two, I spend my entire life at home. I don’t think it’s outrageous to want a change of scene. I go out in the evenings with friends, sometimes, of course. But those have to be scheduled events, and they are often to do specific things, or to meet in specific, pre-arranged locations. What I’d like is somewhere I can go casually—spontaneously even—to just hang out, maybe to see friends, maybe just to get out the house, be around other people, and see what happens. And I need to be able to take my kids. What I lack, I realised, is a third place.
The “third place” is a phrase coined by American sociologist Ray Oldenburg in the 1980s. It refers to a location outside the home and workplace where people gather to socialise. There must be little or no cost to entry and you must be able to simply turn up, hang out, and talk to people. Cinemas, museums, and CrossFit classes don’t count. Church halls, parks, pubs, and coffee shops all potentially fit the bill. Your gym could be a third place if you actually hang out there, rather than just work out and leave. But the membership fees probably disqualify most.
A third place is not, as the FT optimistically suggested in 2022, a co-working cafe. But it could be a wine bar, as these New York Gen Zs are discovering. Starbucks desperately wants to be a third place. Social media might be said to have started out that way. But while I’m sure there are people who still feel they’re building community there, the evidence that it’s making us lonelier is frankly too plentiful to ignore.
The decline of third places has been reported widely in recent years. The way we work (constantly, competitively) and live (always striving) has encouraged the atomisation of society. The internet, with both its distractions and its conveniences, has enabled it. The pandemic, many say, drove the nail into the coffin. (Side note: If you work from home, is a third place still a third place? Or has it been promoted to second place?)
As I rack my brains, trying to conjure the last time I truly had a “third place,” I am forced to reckon with the fact that it’s not until I had children that I even recognised the need for one. Living in London in my 20s, earning what seemed like a decent wage, and paying what felt like a manageable amount of rent, I was only too happy to meet specific friends for specific activities. Pubs, clubs, raves, brunches, Prohibition-theme nights in speakeasy-style bars (it was 2009) quizzes, festivals, theatre, gigs, affordable Secret Cinema (it was 2011), hangover coffee, beers on a car park roof, Easyjet city breaks, craft gin tasting (it was 2014). I honestly think the last time I had a “third place” was the college bar at university. It made me wonder: what would a third place even look like for me, now?
When I lived in Rome, my apartment overlooked a tree-lined piazza where people from the buildings on all four sides would gather. There were several cafes, with seating that extended onto the piazza itself, a small theatre, a legendary pizzeria, a children’s playground and, of course, the church after which the piazza was named. Over 20 years later, something along these lines is what I think of when I think of the ideal “third place”. Well, either that or one of the gorgeous little bars you pass every time you turn a corner into yet another dinky little cobbled plaza in Seville. But I don’t live in Italy or Spain. There’s a reason we don’t gather in squares in the UK. So I need to let go of this idea.
In all honesty, my third place might be something like a pub. It would certainly have to serve alcohol as well as coffee and soft drinks. Not because I need to drink alcohol every time I go out but because I do like to drink alcohol sometimes, and so it’s not going to become my go-to if it doesn’t. But it also needs to be somewhere I can take my children and for it to feel safe and accommodating, as opposed to feeling like we have to leave the minute they start to behave like… well, children. But I don’t know that I need it to cater to them as such. Kids will find ways to play, they just need the space and freedom. Having other kids around also helps.
There is a pub not far from us that has a very small outdoor playground in its garden. This is a good start but it being outdoors means it’s only accessible if the weather’s good, and the size means it is often completely overwhelmed. A better idea, I personally think, would be to make the entire space child-friendly. Seating and tables arranged in such a way that people can sit and chat but there is also running-around space. No table service necessary, we can order from a bar, or hatch, or kiosk. Whether my third place serves food remains open. It would be useful if it did, but I don’t think it’s a deal-breaker. It depends if there are places to get food nearby, and whether we can bring our own snacks in with us. The trickiest part, to my mind, is that I’d like it to be a place I can go with my kids in the daytime, but also be somewhere I’d like to hang out without them, perhaps in the evenings, or for the odd weekday coffee.
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There’s another issue too. In order for a third place to function as a third place, other people have to want to spend time there too. And I don’t know that other people want what I want. When asked about their third places, people tend to name coffee shops, libraries, parks, community cafes and, if they’re young gamers, Fortnite. As I read the accounts, I can already feel myself discounting them. “Oh no that wouldn’t work for me.” But that’s precisely the problem. Having such rigid stipulations is the very thing stopping us finding, and using third places.
I actually go to my local library most weekends. My kids both read (or demand to be read to) voraciously and it’s a good activity to fill a Saturday morning. However, it’s never really felt like a social event for me. Partly because I spend most of it reading to my toddler, or else trying to wrestle her away from the line of kids’ scooters parked outside. Sorry baby, it’s only the books we’re allowed to borrow.
On my last visit, though, I found myself looking around and wondering if I was missing a trick. This library was very much intended as a third place. It’s housed in a 1960s modernist building, sensitively renovated in 2019, and shares the space with a Picturehouse Cinema. The library, “community hub,” events rooms, cinema bar and ticket desk sit at varying levels around a courtyard. They serve coffee, wine, beer, and food. There are wood-panelled ceilings and concrete stairwells. I love it. But I visit it. I don’t hang out there. Why not?
The only answer I have been able to come up with is, because nobody else I know does. I occasionally bump into other local parents but they tend to be, like me, harried and under obligation to the idea of “good parenting”. They aren’t there to hang out, they’re just trying to get their books returned and their kids in and out in time for swimming lessons. When I try to imagine what it would be like to simply turn up, hang out, and talk to people, I feel a flutter of anxiety. This just isn’t a thing people do any more. Or not people my age. Everyone I know, particularly those with kids, is scheduled up to their eyeballs. If I wanted to meet friends at the library I’d have to specifically invite them, pick a date, and make plans. And if I did, would they come? Is hanging out at the library a thing anyone wants to do?
Of course, part of the point of a third place isn’t just to go there at arranged times with people you already know, but to meet new people. “Building community” does not mean, only ever spending time with a carefully curated group. But I would be lying if I said I desperately wanted to spend my weekends chatting to strangers.
All of this—the requisite conditions, the scheduling nightmares, the picking of the right crowd, the feeling that just hanging out in a public space and talking to whoever’s around is undesirable and possibly a bit weird—suggests that we don’t actually want third places as much as we think we do.
I read an interesting essay this week that touched on this. In
, the writer argued that Gen Z are suffering from a resilience drought, and that the major obstacle to finding meaningful connection and community in 2025 is the unwillingness to compromise. “Community,” she writes, “requires sacrifice to your autonomy. [...] If you aren’t willing to go outside of your comfort bubble for someone, no government-mandated third spaces are going to magically gift you with a sense of community.”I think this extends well beyond Gen Z. A lot of us talk about wanting community, few of us want to do the things that actually allow us to build it. And the first and foremost among those things is compromise. I’ve been thinking about this ever since I read this confronting essay in
on how we all make a lot of noise about how “it takes a village” but actually what people want is to be helped. And not only that, we want to be helped by people who will do things the way we like them and without friction. But there’s no way to get that kind of seamless help unless you pay for it. Furthermore, we don’t want to feel obliged to return the favour because that would mean inconveniencing ourselves and we’re just too busy.When I started this newsletter, my intention was to invite enquiry. What do we need from third places, in 2025? If you were to design your own, what would it look like? It wasn’t until I was halfway through writing it, realising that my central premise had collapsed, that I began to see my own culpability in the situation. I do have a third place. I’m just not using it. For the library to become my third place I would need to relax my requirements and be open to a kind of socialising that looks different to anything I’ve really done before. That’s daunting. But it’s also kind of exciting.
Tomorrow is Saturday which means library day and I think I’m going to try to do it differently this time. To ease myself in, I’ll text around a few local friends and let them know our plans. But if that fails, I’m just going to… turn up, hang out, and talk to people.
Do you have a third place? Where is it? Is there anything it lacks? What compromises (or - better word! - adaptations) do you think you’ve made in order to allow this third place work for you?
Ratatouille, the 2007 film about a cartoon rat that loves to cook? That Ratatouille? The New York Times article, from which I grabbed this, doesn’t elaborate. But a brief dive into social media shows a surprising amount of people seriously discussing the film’s culinary chops. And all I can say is move over, Sideways. Ratatouille, it turns out, is a wine movie.
Speaking of wine, the FT this week launched it’s all-new food and drink team (including Observer refugee Jay Rayner) and the multi-pager on “rules of restaurant dining” was great fun. Very much enjoyed the outrage from the American critics who wouldn’t dream of discussing chefs and restaurants with anything less than deep reverence. But actually the feature I liked more was Tim Haywards codification of The Sandwich. I’m so unbelievable here for this kind of pedantry.
As my own offering, I would like to present this ham, mustard and crisp sandwich that I made myself a few weekends ago. My husband was away and I had spent what felt like the entire weekend cooking, either for my kids, or for myself and my friends (who I’d invited over in lieu of being able to go out). By Sunday night I was absolutely done, but rather than just chuck something on toast, as per my initial instinct, I decided to commit an act of indecorous self-care by very intentionally making myself a ham sandwich. Plenty of butter, and a good smear of mustard later, I suddenly remembered I had some crisps leftover from our pre-dinner nibbles. The way forward was clear.
Now what wine would you pair with this?
It feels so hard that everything requires so much effort (I don’t say this sarcastically)! I haven’t yet figured out how to put energy into community building without almost burning myself out on it and taking on too much. I’ve felt in the past that if you put the effort in to organize things then you just become ‘the organizer’ and that also isn’t a community.