In Search of Today’s Third Places

Ruminating why we need them and my quest for my own.

Sundaze Book Café is the home of everyday magic, joyful living and conversations likely to be had over a hot drink with a friend in your favourite café, capturing the syrup-slow feel and glow of a Sunday. I’m Michelle, and I’ll be your host this Sunday.

Whenever I’m in need of something reliable and comforting, I play Friends in the background. I’m a millennial, duh. For all of its failings, it’s still the TV show that brings me the most joy when things feel uncertain or shaky. And shaky, things are.

Coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg, a third place is a social space outside of home or workplaces where ‘people can connect with their community’. The best thing about Friends is that the six characters always return to Central Perk no matter the circumstance¹. This third place was where Rachel made a beeline for when leaving her fiancé at the altar, it’s where Chandler breaks up with Janice, it’s where everyday mundane conversations take place, and it’s the in-between of the friends’ apartments and their workplaces. Like so many fellow 90s kids, I sort of assumed that I too would enjoy a Central Perk of my own with a bunch of friends to elbow through life with.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve spent my adult life seeking a third space that’d give me the same feeling that watching Friends does. It didn’t have to be a café, but what a revelation that’d have been for my caffeine-addled mind in my twenties. Perhaps it could be a pub or a craft club or an evening-hours bookshop. I came close to finding my third space when I joined a Pilates studio and the gym back in 2016, but the community feel disappeared post-pandemic².

And, we’re collectively suffering from a loss of community right now. (Isn’t that ironic?) Despite being more technically connected than ever before – the digital age, am I right? – more people feel lonely than ever before. According to the Campaign to End Loneliness, in 2024, ‘approximately 7.1% of people in Great Britain (3.83 million) experience chronic loneliness’, meaning they feel lonely ‘often or always’. We’re hellbent on building communities online because the chance for most offline ones has been taken from us. In the UK, community spaces and projects are regularly defunded, so it feels like it’s up to us to create it ourselves.

Somewhere in my quest, I realised that my long-standing blog became my third place. An advantage of social media (for all of its misgivings and awful side effects, which I won’t touch on in this essay) is that is has given all of us a place to openly talk about niche interests, pick up new cosy hobbies and the people to experience them with, voice opinions about important issues, and simply unwind in safe(ish) spaces for us. On a personal level, I’m forever grateful to have built a community through my blog while I was a pretty lonely teenager that’d lost her circle of friends. For me, social media has always been about the community rather than the content, and I’d like to think I’ve only cultivated positive spaces and third places online.

(Perhaps I haven’t.)

In my search for a third place, it’s clear to see thousands of young people and people in their twenties and thirties are wishing for analogue lives, a connection to other people and stories in real life, the ability to see tangible evidence of a life well-lived through journals, photos, scrapbooks. While digital spaces offer a glimpse into this, we need more. Let’s not rely on gazing through the lens of somebody’s GRWM video, or digital journalling for the convenience, or making junk journals to photograph for Instagram. Let’s reconnect in the real world: get ready for a girls’ day out with your friend at the same house, buy a notebook and wreck (my plans, that’s my man 🎵)³ it scribbling thoughts, appointments, memories from the day. Let’s bring back scrapbooks to collect all the whimsy ephemera from all of our days because all of them are important. Let’s support independent businesses that are providing a third place amidst the late-stage capitalism world we find ourselves in. Whether it’s popping to a coffee shop and enjoying a book or video game or natter with the other person sitting solo, or taking a walk to a gorgeous local park, take yourself into the third space by taking out your earphones and encourage a little human connection.

The truth is, we all need a place to be.

1. The worst thing about Friends is Ross Geller and the extreme lack of diversity.

2. Likely more words to come in the future about how the pandemic shattered community for so many of us.

3. Never not sneaking Taylor Swift into any and all of my writing.