The Place We No Longer Have

A man sits alone in a parked car outside Tesco eating a sausage roll he does not particularly want. Another scrolls his phone on a gym bench between sets, surrounded by people he will never speak to. Three pensioners occupy the same table in a Wetherspoons every Thursday at noon, not because the food is good but because it is one of the last places in Britain where you can exist for two hours over a £1.79 coffee without being hurried along.

None of this is accidental.

Come gather round people

One of the strangest things about England — once you notice it — is how few places we have that are designed simply for human gathering. There is space for commerce. There is a lot of transitory space. Space for spectacle. Yet gathering feels strangely absent.

Go almost anywhere in continental Europe and you will eventually arrive in a square. A plaza. A piazza. A market space that says: this town assumes people may wish to linger together. Cafés spill outward. Children kick footballs against fountains. Old men conduct highly animated arguments over absolutely nothing. Teenagers orbit one another under the forgiving gaze of public life. The square is not merely architecture. It is a social philosophy made stone.

England, by contrast, tends to organise itself around roads. Its towns are not usually centred on communal space but on movement through space. High streets. Ring roads. Traffic systems. Retail corridors. Even many of our famous “squares” are not truly squares in the Mediterranean sense. Trafalgar Square is a monumental junction. Leicester Square is essentially an entertainment holding pen. England has plazas that function as through-routes rather than places of civic belonging.

The Englishman does not gather. He passes through.

Higgledy piggledy

Partly this is historical accident. England urbanised differently from much of continental Europe. Medieval English towns often grew organically around trade routes, markets and parish churches rather than according to grand civic plans. Many continental squares emerged from deliberate political and religious visions: the city-state displaying its confidence, the bishop asserting authority, the republic staging public life.

English communal spaces existed too — market greens, churchyards, commons, broad market streets — but they tended to evolve pragmatically rather than ceremonially. They were places of exchange more than performance. Perhaps that reflects something deeper in the culture itself.

England has evidently long harboured a certain suspicion of public communal life. It is historically Protestant rather than Catholic, commercial rather than civic, pragmatic rather than theatrical. Continental Europe often celebrated visible public life: festivals, processions, evening promenades, civic ritual. English culture frequently preferred life behind walls — home, parish, pub, club — smaller and more bounded forms of belonging.

Fretted with golden fire

None of this means England is incapable of beauty or collective meaning. Quite the opposite. England built some of the most extraordinary cathedrals on earth. York Minster, Durham, Wells, Salisbury. These are not the works of a people indifferent to transcendence or craftsmanship. Perhaps that itself reveals something important. English grandeur often reached upward toward God, monarchy or scholarship rather than outward toward civic sociability. England mastered the cathedral close, the college quad, the private garden and the country estate more readily than the bustling public square.

There are also material reasons why England developed differently. Historians of urbanism point to the early enclosure movement and England’s unusually strong traditions of private property. Common land diminished earlier here than in parts of southern Europe. Then the industrial revolution arrived with extraordinary force. Britain reorganised itself around production, transport and commerce decades before many of its neighbours. Railways, mills, roads and terraced housing rapidly displaced older communal geographies. Victorian Britain achieved astonishing feats of engineering and wealth creation, but often at the expense of leisurely civic space.

Even now, England tends instinctively to value infrastructure that facilitates economic activity over infrastructure that facilitates social life. We will fund roads, retail development and logistics hubs while treating communal spaces as decorative luxuries.

Somewhere along the line we began to assume the market would provide society for us. It hasn’t.

Market economy or market society

Instead, modern Britain increasingly offers transactional space. Places where you must either buy something, move along, or justify your presence. Shopping centres replace marketplaces. Coffee chains replace cafés. Benches acquire hostile dividers to prevent lingering. Parks are neglected unless they can host ticketed events. Even pubs, once our closest equivalent to communal squares, disappear by the hundreds each year.

And something profound happens to people when there is nowhere simply to be among others. Loneliness becomes normal but difficult to name.

Men especially struggle here because male friendship has often depended less on explicit emotional openness and more on shared presence. Side-by-side companionship. Watching football together. Standing at the bar. Casual repetition. Men frequently bond not through confessional intensity but through proximity and ritual.

Take away the spaces that permit this and male isolation accelerates. The irony is that humans remain desperate for collective life. You can see it in the absurd popularity of farmers’ markets, beer festivals, park runs, street food fairs, Christmas markets and outdoor screenings. The hunger for public sociability has not vanished. It erupts wherever temporary permission is granted.

For a brief moment, people remember themselves as communal creatures, then the barriers return. The traffic resumes. The temporary fencing comes down. Everyone goes home.

This matters because public space shapes public behaviour. Where people regularly encounter one another informally, trust tends to grow. Inter-generational life becomes visible. Civic identity thickens. Difference becomes less abstract because actual humans occupy shared terrain together.

Alone in a crowd (again)

Without common spaces, society fragments into private consumption units. The result is not only loneliness but suspicion. Everyone becomes either an obstacle, a competitor, or a stranger. The old idea of citizenship — of belonging to a place and to one another — weakens because there is nowhere physical in which that belonging is enacted.

Perhaps this helps explain why modern Britain often feels simultaneously crowded and lonely. We live near each other but not with each other. We pass constantly without gathering. Infrastructure facilitates circulation rather than communion.

Even language reveals it. The English speak of “getting on the property ladder” far more than joining a community. Home ownership became the substitute for civic life. The private garden replaced the public square. Retreat became aspiration.

Of course, there are exceptions. Some market towns retain functioning centres. Certain neighbourhoods create pockets of sociability against the odds. Football grounds still offer one of the few remaining forms of cross-class collective ritual in English life. And whenever councils pedestrianise an area or build genuinely usable public space, people flood into it almost immediately, proving the appetite was always there. Humans do not stop wanting one another.

A sense of place

So what might we do about it? Probably not build imitation Tuscan piazzas beside Pret a Manger and call it regeneration. But we could begin by remembering that public life requires public space. We could pedestrianise town centres not merely to increase retail footfall but to encourage human lingering. We could design parks with cafés, seating and inter-generational use in mind rather than defensive architecture intended to prevent teenagers existing visibly. We could preserve pubs, libraries and sports clubs as civic assets rather than treating them solely as businesses that deserve to disappear if insufficiently profitable. We could build housing around walkable communal areas rather than around traffic flow and parking maximisation.

Most importantly, perhaps, England could recover the idea that not every square metre of land must justify itself economically. Some places should exist simply because human beings need to encounter one another in ordinary life.

Civilisation is not only what a society produces. It is also where its people are permitted to belong.

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This post was previously published on SUBSTACK.COM.

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