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The Third Place

Lars Stenberg, Sensory Trust

There’s a commercial on at the moment advertising a coffee machine. Not that it’s called a coffee machine. No no. This is a “hot beverage system” and appears to be styled on the inside of an Audi TT. Although it could be said that the inside of an Audi TT already looks like an expensive coffee machine. Whatever the case, the machine is being sold on the strength that the group of twenty-something women featured in the commercial will no longer have to make the laborious trek to Antonio’s coffee bar and suffer his suggestive inanities as they can now get proper coffee in their own homes! Hooray for progress!

Now, where am I going to start with this? I’ll set aside the fact that the commercial is a product of the Soho advertising machine, a place alive with coffee bars which I’m willing to bet are stuffed to the gunwales with “creative” [sic] media types. I'll also leave the unsustainable packaging aside. No, the thing that riles me most is that this is another example of big business trying to muscle in on our Third Places.

We all need a Third Place. A place like the mythical Antonio's that isn’t work and isn’t home. A place where we have a set of social contacts who are more than strangers but not quite friends. A place where we can just be ourselves – read a book, drink a coffee, chat, play chess, watch people or what ever.

The recipe for successful Third Places continually evades replication by multinationals. Third Places grow organically where people need them. Cafés and pubs, garden centres and community centres, parks and allotments. They defy multinational copycats largely because their profits and turnover are too low or non-existent. They simply don’t make enough money. Many third places are cafés, but the cafés owned by multinationals are rarely third places, no matter how much they wish they were or tell us they are.

Despite aggressive marketing and land-grab tactics, the greatest threat to third places comes not from the chains of pseudo-cafés but from our own homes. They’re more comfortable and, if you have enough mains sockets in your living room, entertaining than they have ever been before. There was an advertising campaign a few years ago for a video game console with the hook line “welcome to the Third Place”. It’s a moot point whether many of the target market understood what the Third Place was, but the message was familiar enough. Why get rained on, mugged or have a pint of Irish cider (with ice) spilled down your back when you can get movies on demand, get better views at the football match, race cars and shoot aliens, have dinner delivered and make a hot beverage at the flick of a stylishly curved aluminium switch?

Two words: cabin fever. We all need to go out. If you’re having trouble with that statement you may need to have a look through the rest of this site. Spending too much time indoors can lead to feelings of loneliness, anxiety, depression and a disconnection from society. Home cinemas and coffee machines give a glossy veneer to the experience but they are little compensation for a loss of real contact with people and with the natural world. Sensory Trust spends a considerable amount of effort making it possible for people who have difficulty going out to do so. And while we’re doing this multinationals are spending the equivalent of decades (perhaps centuries) of Sensory Trust budget advertising products that will keep more of us stuck in our homes for longer.

The fact is that we rarely go to Antonio’s coffee bar for the coffee. In fact there are third places where the awfulness of the coffee is something that unites everyone that goes there. We go to see other people, to step out of our home or work lives and remember who we are when we’re just being ourselves.

The television commercial tells us not only that we should buy the hot beverage system but that we should rejoice that Antonio’s will be empty and be forced to close, presumably so that it can be replaced by a multinational franchised outlet who is also a client of the advertising company. Then of course we can look forward to spending more time in our homes, watching television commercials… It's not only Antonio that suffers: public space budgets are the first in the firing line when no one goes to the park.

With any luck this won’t be yet another kick in the teeth for Third Places. The hot beverage system will join the toastie maker on eBay before the year is out. Hopefully Antonio will still be there when it does.