Third Places

on belonging between home and the road

The Wellcome Collection Reading Room, London

“Have you seen the exhibit yet?”

I looked up from my sketchbook page into the smiling face of my table companion.

“Yes, I just came from there… breathtakingly beautiful work. So sensual…”

My table mate nodded.

“I am heading there when I finish my tea.”

It was 12:30 p.m. this past Wednesday, and I was in the café at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. I had popped into the complex at Burlington House — home to the Academy and five royal scientific societies — looking for respite from the half-term tourist crowds and the sputtering rain alternating with gusty winds. Large signs advertising A Story of South Asian Art drew me into the vast courtyard and the warm lobby beyond.

After viewing the exhibit, I entered the café to find every table occupied. Seeing one woman sitting alone at a table for four, I asked if I might join her. She readily agreed and returned to her newspaper and scone. And then, with her simple question, there I was, deep in conversation with a stranger.

Our discussion moved from the work of Mrinalini Mukherjee and her circle to the arts more broadly, and then to the building itself. She told me her late husband had designed and built sundials for major buildings and institutions in the UK and beyond. I asked about his background — an engineer — whether he worked in stone or metal (mostly metal), and how complicated it was to calculate the dial pattern for a new location. She recommended places I should visit in London and added several excellent cafés for good measure.

I was looking for a third place. And I found it.

The term “third places” describes social spaces in a city or community that are neither work (first places) nor home (second places). They are open, accessible gathering spots where we come together in the public sphere: to read and write, to eat and linger, to observe and be observed. Third places are where we connect, build community, and foster social bonds outside of family and work.

The funny thing about sharing a table or sitting beside someone in a park is that proximity invites conversation. On Wednesday, our shared table led in such an unexpected direction that I could only marvel at the serendipity of it all. Sundials. Who would have thought it?

All week, I have been testing tables. A small café in Hampstead where I flirted lightly with the waiter over sourdough toast and cappuccino, my sketchbook open but my pencil hovering, too timid to draw my first sketch of the trip. A tearoom after crossing Hampstead Heath and wandering through Kenwood House, where an Italian couple shared their vacation plans, guidebook open between us. A fishmonger and restaurant where the owner and her customer offered ten minutes of recipes and laughter.

And now, today, the Reading Room at the Wellcome Collection, where I feel I have hit the jackpot. The space is beautifully designed, with no requirement to purchase anything. I have no particular interest in the medical library itself, and yet the exhibits on historical and contemporary approaches to health, our bodies, and the environment are fascinating. At the end of the day, books don’t discriminate. Perhaps that is why libraries are among my favorite third places.

I have a lovely apartment in Hampstead this week. I even moved the breakfast table to the window so I can write while looking out at a 100-year-old London plane tree in the public square below. It is peaceful there. Beautiful. Entirely mine.

And still, I keep going out.

In a week when I am neither home nor yet on the road, I am suspended between first and second places. I am finding my way.

I love being alone. I am comfortable traveling solo and rarely feel lonely. But I am a social being at heart, and I am seeking inspiration from this city. A London plane tree, as magnificent as it is, can only offer so much in a week. As beautiful as my window view may be, writing alone is not the same as writing among others.

As I sit here in the Reading Room, settled into a comfortable armchair, I glance up from my screen. Two women around my age are deeply engrossed in their books. An older man reads a magazine. A group of students huddle over their notes at a long table. I hear English and French and what sounds, to my untutored ear, like Polish. I feel part of something larger than my own small world. And even if that feeling is partly illusion, I am connected to these people in our shared humanity, and our shared love of this space.

Being here offers necessary friction as well. Yes, Emily Dickinson wrote from the isolation of her tiny room, but I am not her. Nor do I wish to be. The hum of conversation, the movement around me, even the two very loud young women who have just settled onto the sofa nearby provide a welcome reality check. Life is not silent. Being here makes my day real. It reveals the difference between isolation at my apartment table and the solitude I feel here — alone, but not apart.

As I sink back into the chair and rest my head against the cushion, I wonder whether being here — being in all these third places this week — has offered a kind of necessary witness. Made me visible in the world at a time when I am not unhappy or distressed, but floating slightly between chapters. Travel often does this. Being between home and the road makes it more so. Today is a gentle pause after a long walking tour this morning, a chance to savor what third places offer: respite, regrouping, and, if one is lucky, connection.

It occurs to me that I am using these third places to replace the Blue Car’s connective magic. The car is not merely a machine that carries me from place to place; it is a kind of mobile third place. Not a gathering space in the traditional sense, and yet it gathers. It draws strangers in. It invites conversation and connection. I love this about the Blue Car almost as much as I love being behind the wheel on a winding country road.

My beloved car collapses the barrier between traveler and local, between isolation and connection. It transforms parking lots into plazas. It gives strangers a reason to gather, to tell stories, to reminisce about the car they once owned or the one they wish they had. It turns anonymous space into civic space.

In its absence, I see more clearly what I have been missing — not the driving, but the gathering.

So here in London, I am building smaller plazas. One café table at a time. One shared scone. One conversation about South Asian sculpture or Dover sole or sundials.

Traveling alone is never quite as solitary as it appears. A third place is not only a café or a library or a museum lobby. It is the moment we choose proximity over isolation — the small courage of pulling out a chair.

Soon enough, the Blue Car will arrive in Le Havre and the road will begin. Until then, I am practicing how to belong without it.

Susan

From the Blue Car Europe Series

For the First Essay in the Series: A Glimmer of an Idea

For the Previous Essay: Before the Blue Car

For the Next Essay: Above Ground