A man sits alone in a parked car outside Tesco eating a sausage roll he doesn’t particularly want. Another scrolls through his phone on a gym bench between sets, around which he will never speak. Three pensioners share a table at a Wetherspoons every Thursday afternoon, not because the food is good but because it’s one of the last places in Britain where you can spend two hours over a £1.79 coffee without being rushed.
None of this is accidental.
Gather people around
One of the strangest things about England – once you notice it – is how few places we have that are designed solely for the gathering of people. There is room for trade-offs. There are many transient places. places of interest Yet the assembly feels oddly absent.
Go almost anywhere in continental Europe and you’ll eventually reach a square. a plaza a piazza A market place that says: This city assumes that people want to live together. Cafes spread outwards. Children kicking a football against a fountain. Old men argue very animatedly about absolutely nothing. Teenagers circle each other under the forgiving gaze of public life. The square is not just architecture. It is the building block of a social philosophy.
England, by contrast, tends to organize itself around the road. Its cities are generally not centered on communal space but on movement through space. high road Ring Road. Traffic system. Retail Corridor. Even many of our famous “squares” are not true squares in the Mediterranean sense. Trafalgar Square is a monumental junction. Leicester Square is basically an entertainment pen. England has plazas that serve as routes rather than civic spaces.
English people don’t gather. passes through it.
Higgledy piggledy
This is partly a historical accident. England urbanized 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 arose from deliberate political and religious visions: the city-state displayed its trust, the bishop asserted authority, the republic staged public life.
English communal spaces also existed — market greens, churchyards, commons, broad market streets — but they tended to develop pragmatically rather than ceremonially. They were places of exchange rather than performance. Perhaps it reflects something deeper in the culture.
England has obviously long harbored a certain suspicion of communal life. It has historically been Protestant rather than Catholic, commercial rather than civic, pragmatist rather than theatrical. Continental Europe often celebrated visible public life: festivals, processions, evening walks, civic rituals. English culture often prefers life behind walls — houses, parishes, pubs, clubs — to smaller and more enclosed forms of belonging.
Golden is furious with fire
None of this means that England is incapable of beauty or collective meaning. Quite the opposite. England has built some of the most remarkable cathedrals in the world. York Minster, Durham, Wales, Salisbury. They are not the work of people who are transcendent or indifferent to craftsmanship. Perhaps this in itself reveals something important. English majesty is often directed upward toward God, monarchy, or scholarship rather than outward toward civil society. England mastered cathedral closes, college quads, private gardens and country estates more easily than crowded public squares.
There are also reasons why England developed differently. Historians of urbanism point to the early enclosure movement and England’s unusually strong tradition of private property. There is less common land here than in parts of southern Europe. Then came the Industrial Revolution with tremendous force. Britain reorganized itself around manufacturing, transport and trade decades before many of its neighbours. Railways, mills, roads and terraced housing quickly displaced the old communal geographies. Victorian Britain achieved astonishing feats of engineering and wealth creation, but often at the expense of leisurely civic spaces.
Even now, England inherently values 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 begin to assume that the market will provide for us. It didn’t.
Market economy or market society
Instead, modern Britain increasingly offered a place of transaction. Places where you must buy something, accompany or justify your presence. Shopping centers replace marketplaces. Replace the coffee chain cafe. 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 every year.
And something profound happens to people when there is simply nowhere to be among others. Loneliness becomes normal but hard to name.
Men especially struggle here because male friendships often rely less on obvious emotional openness and more on shared presence. Companionship as well. Watching football together. standing at the bar Casual repetition. Men often bond not through confessional intensity but through proximity and ritual.
Take away the space that allows and accelerates male isolation. The irony is that people are desperate for collective life. You can see this in the absurd popularity of farmers markets, beer festivals, park runs, street food fairs, Christmas markets and outdoor screenings. The social hunger of the public has not gone away. It explodes wherever temporary permission is granted.
For a moment, humans remember themselves as communal animals, then the barrier returns. Traffic resumes. The temporary fence comes down. Everyone goes home.
This is important because public space shapes public behavior. Where people encounter each other informally on a regular basis, trust tends to grow. Intergenerational life becomes visible. Civic identity deepens. Differences become less abstract as real people occupy shared terrain together.
alone in the crowd (again)
Without common space, society becomes fragmented into individual consumption units. The result is not only loneliness but also doubt. Everyone becomes either an obstacle, a competitor or a stranger. The old notion of citizenship—of belonging to a place and to one another—is weakened because there is no physical place where 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 continuously without gathering. Infrastructure facilitates circulation rather than communication.
Even language expresses it. The English speak of “climbing the property ladder” rather than joining a community. Home ownership became an alternative to civil life. Private gardens replaced public squares. Retreat became aspiration.
Of course, there are exceptions. Some market towns retain functional centers. Some neighborhoods 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 pedestrianize an area or create genuinely usable public space, people flood in almost immediately, proving that the hunger has always been there. People never stop wanting each other.
sense of place
So what can we do about it? Maybe don’t build an imitation Tuscan piazza next to a pret a manger and call it a rebirth. But we can begin by remembering that public life requires public space. We can pedestrianize town centers not only to increase the number of retail shoppers, but to encourage people to linger. We can design parks with cafes, seating areas, and intergenerational use in mind, rather than protective architecture intended to visibly resist existing teenagers. We can preserve pubs, libraries and sports clubs as civic assets rather than just treating them as businesses that deserve to disappear if they are insufficiently profitable. We can build housing in walkable communal areas without being around traffic flow and maximizing parking.
Most importantly, perhaps, England can recover the idea that not every square meter of land has to justify itself economically. Some places should exist simply because people need to encounter each other in ordinary life.
Civilization is not just what society produces. This is where its people are allowed to belong.
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This post was Previously published on SUBSTACK.COM.
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