The sociologist Ray Oldenburg had a term for the places that weren't home and weren't work. He called them "third places" — the coffee shops, pubs, barbershops, bookstores, and park benches where community happened without anyone trying to make it happen. You'd walk in, sit down, overhear a conversation, join in or not, and leave feeling slightly more connected to the world around you. No agenda. No networking. Just people being around other people.
Those places are disappearing. And I don't think we've reckoned with what that means.
The optimisation of everything
Starbucks used to be a third place. That was literally its founding pitch — not home, not work, but a comfortable middle ground where you could sit for hours. Then the spreadsheets arrived. Same-store sales needed to grow. Revenue per square foot became the metric that mattered. The comfortable chairs were replaced with hard ones. The tables got smaller. The music got louder. The message, whether they'd admit it or not, became: buy your drink and leave.
It happened everywhere. Pubs became gastropubs with table bookings and two-hour limits. Bookshops became Amazon warehouses. Barbershops became "grooming experiences" with online booking and a fifteen-minute slot. Even libraries — the original free third place — have been defunded, merged, or turned into "community hubs" with hot-desking and meeting rooms.
The pattern is always the same. A place that existed for lingering gets optimised for throughput. A place that existed for community gets monetised for profit. The inefficiency — the sitting around, the overhearing, the accidental conversations — was the whole point. And we optimised it away.
The digital promise that wasn't
Social media was supposed to fix this. Facebook groups, Twitter communities, Reddit forums — these were meant to be the new third places. Digital gathering spots where you'd find your people regardless of geography.
And for a brief, beautiful window, they were. Peak Twitter — roughly 2010 to 2015 — was the closest thing I've experienced to a digital third place. You'd log on, see what was happening, overhear brilliant conversations, jump in when you had something to add, and leave feeling like you'd been somewhere. It wasn't performative. It wasn't optimised. It was just people being interesting in public.
Then engagement became the metric. The algorithm replaced the timeline. The feed stopped showing you what your friends were saying and started showing you what would keep you scrolling. The third place became a performance stage. You weren't lingering anymore. You were performing. Posting for reach, not for connection. Optimising your takes for virality, not for truth.
The internet killed the forum and replaced it with the feed. Forums were messy, slow, and full of people who genuinely cared about niche topics. Feeds are slick, fast, and full of people performing for an invisible audience. One was a third place. The other is a billboard.
What London tells us
I live in London, and I feel this loss acutely. London should be the world's greatest city for third places. It has the density, the diversity, the history. Walk down any street and you'll see the ghosts of them — the corner pubs that closed, the independent bookshops that became estate agents, the cafes that were replaced by chain coffee outlets.
The pubs that survive have split into two categories: gastropubs serving fifteen-quid burgers to couples on dates, or sports bars with wall-to-wall screens and sticky floors. Neither is a third place. One is a restaurant that happens to serve beer. The other is entertainment, not community.
The independent coffee shops are the closest thing London has left to genuine third places. The ones that still have comfortable seating, that don't rush you, that let the regulars know each other by name. They exist, but they're getting rarer. The economics don't work. A flat white costs four pounds and a customer who sits for three hours generates less revenue than four customers who take away.
I think about this when I'm building projects. Some of my favourite builds — the pub guide, the restaurant directory — are fundamentally about helping people find places to go. But the deeper question is: what are they finding? A place to consume, or a place to belong?
Where community goes now
The third place isn't dead. It's just harder to find, and it looks different from what Oldenburg described.
Some of the most vibrant communities I've seen recently exist in small Discord servers. Not the massive ones with thousands of members and channel after channel of noise. The small ones. Thirty to fifty people who genuinely know each other, who share things because they think the group would enjoy them, who have inside jokes and ongoing conversations. These feel like third places. They're not performative. They're not optimised. They're just people being around each other.
Creative co-ops and maker spaces are having a moment too. Not the WeWork model — that's just an office you don't own. I mean the scrappy ones, the ones run by people who care more about the community than the revenue. They're rare but they exist, and the people who use them are fiercely loyal.
And then there are the accidental third places. The launderette where everyone chats while waiting. The park bench where the same people gather every morning. The school gates where parents become friends. These aren't designed as third places, but they function as them because they share the essential ingredient: time. Time spent without agenda, without optimisation, without someone trying to monetise the interaction.
Building the third place back
I don't have a grand solution. I don't think anyone does. You can't engineer belonging. You can't A/B test community. But you can build things that create space for it to happen.
That's what I keep coming back to with my projects. The pub guide isn't just a list of pubs — it's an argument that these places matter, that they're worth finding and worth supporting. The culture aggregator isn't just a news feed — it's a shared space where links and ideas can collide. Even this blog, in its own small way, is an attempt to create a corner of the internet that feels like a place rather than a platform.
The third place was never about the coffee or the beer or the books. It was about the permission to linger. We need to build that permission back into our physical spaces and our digital ones. Because without places to just be — without agenda, without productivity, without a time limit — we lose something that no app, no algorithm, and no subscription can replace.
We lose each other.
