24th February 2025 | Lifestyle

The Need For Third Spaces

Commerce and culture are intertwined. Markets are more than places to get your goods; they’re meeting points for people to gather, connect, and create community.

Historically, at least in the UK, pubs have also played their part. My grandad’s local occupies a utopian state in his mind because he knew that’s where he’d find his friends every evening after work. Personally, I prefer a café, but whatever works for you, we all need an environment to call our own that’s distinct from home.

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term ‘third space’ for places where people gather outside of home and work. While there, conversation should be your primary activity. These places must be neutral ground, inclusive, and provide a sense of comfort that encourages you to return regularly. That explains why whenever I move home, the first thing on my agenda is to find a new favourite café nearby. We crave connection, and businesses realise this.

Initially, shared working spaces offered freelancers and sole traders environments with office facilities and amenities. These developed into efficient but uninspiring cubicle offices with desks for hire, and while isolation may have prevented distraction, eventually morale suffered.

Searching for an alternative, a San Francisco community coworking space opened in 2005, the first of its kind. Far from the brightly coloured furnishings and accompanying pool table movies would have you imagine, coworking spaces began with a few people working separately, sharing some folding tables. It was humble, but uniting individuals who were used to working alone gained traction.

Today, shared workspaces prioritise people’s well-being, designing inspiring environments to encourage a fluid exchange of ideas and even offering wellness benefits. The workplace stopped just being a place of productivity; it became experiential. Recently, retail has been given the same treatment.

Shopping centres and retail parks used to be spaces where we’d gather in hoards. However, as online spending snatched its share of the retail market while the British high street rapidly declined, shopfronts were increasingly left empty. To combat the crisis and give independent businesses an affordable alternative, in 2011 a cluster of shipping containers called Boxpark opened in Shoreditch. The concept utilised the third space theory and combined it with the communal aspect of coworking to create an assortment of independent businesses and retailers in one corrugated collective space.

Founder Roger Wade created the world’s first pop-up mall, a space for retailers and start-ups to affordably showcase their brands. Furthermore, building an experiential environment with regular events led to businesses benefiting from each other’s exposure and foot traffic. When you walk in, you immediately want to walk around and see what’s available; you never know what might have moved in since you last visited.

Because of their experiential offerings and an increased sense of community, multi-business spaces are revolutionising consumer retail. After the success of its initial Shoreditch space, Boxpark’s empire has rapidly expanded to include eight locations in four UK cities.

Closer to home, independent Swansea businesses are experiencing a similar collective working transformation. In Uplands, RAVS, a retro and vintage store, shares its space with Highwater Gallery, a tattoo studio, and Hard Knock Barbers, three unique enterprises with an overlapping appreciation of aesthetics. Not only is a shared approach better for business and creating community, but as a customer, what could be more exciting than knowing you might be browsing t-shirts now, but you could leave with a trim or tattoo?