A Third Place Needs a Cave: Cavendish Space as Third Place

Our glossary asks a question we keep coming back to:

If you’re not at home and you’re not at work or school but you are at a place that provides community without being required to buy stuff, where are you?

You’re in third space.
Quick little “how to” for including autistic people in community events, quoted on our Third Places page

We have already said, more than once, that the public library is both a third place and a Cavendish Space. Our Library page says it. Our Infodumplings celebrating libraries said it. Our Campfire on the history of the public library called the library “the original Cavendish Space and the original third place.”

This piece asks the harder question underneath that. If the two ideas overlap, where do they part? And what does Cavendish Space add to the third place that many of us need in order to walk in at all?

The short answer: the classic third place is a watering hole. A Cavendish Space is a third place with a cave and a campfire in it, and a door you are allowed to stand outside.

What a third place is

The term third place is Ray Oldenburg’s, from his 1989 book The Great Good Place. Home is the first place. Work or school is the second. The third is everywhere else we gather: the café, the pub, the barbershop, the library, the corner store with chairs out front.

The third place is a generic designation for a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.
Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, second edition (1999), p. 16

Our glossary carries a list of what makes one:

Characteristics of third places:

neutral ground

leveling place

conversation space

open & accessible

regulars

low profile

playful mood

home away from home

What Our Cities Are Missing

And the same video names what our version is after:

Radical third places would not only be accessible in terms of location and opening hours, but also in terms of creating basic accommodations for the spectrum of abilities of its participants.
What Our Cities Are Missing

Oldenburg called the third place “the people’s own remedy for stress, loneliness, and alienation” and complained that it “seems easy to ignore” (p. 20). It was ignored. Third places are disappearing, and the glossary quotes that too: “The loss of third places is a global phenomenon.” (Nowhere to Go: The Loss of Third Places)

What a Cavendish Space is

Cavendish Space is named for Henry Cavendish — discoverer of hydrogen, weigher of the Earth, and by any modern reading Autistic. He needed his cave: his house, his laboratory, his sensory and social cocoon. He also needed, now and then, the company of a few peers at the Royal Society’s Monday Club. That was his campfire. And he needed Charles Blagden, a friend who carried his ideas out to the watering holes of science so he did not have to.

David Thornburg’s three primordial learning spaces give the shape: caves, campfires, and watering holes. cavendish.space adds two more zones — the library and the habitat — and one rule that matters more than any of them:

A zone is a place, not a state. … You zone the room. The room does not zone anybody.
What is a Cavendish Space?

Put the two lists side by side and the overlap is obvious. Both are about places that hold people without owning them. Both are about belonging without a transaction. But they were drawn from different bodies, and it shows.

Reading the eight characteristics through Cavendish

Take the list one item at a time. Most of it holds. One item breaks, and how it breaks is the whole argument.

Neutral ground

Oldenburg defines it in a parenthesis:

The “neutral ground” (space upon which one is not burdened by the role of host or guest) of third places offers the great ease of association so important to community life. People may come and go just when they please and are beholden to no one.
Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, p. xviii

Nobody has to perform belonging to be allowed to stay. Come and go just when they please is the closest Oldenburg gets to Cavendish Space, and it is in a preface, not in his list.

Cavendish Space agrees, and goes a step further. Neutral ground means the room makes no claim on your state. Nobody reads how regulated you look and sends you somewhere. You go where you need to go. The room holds still.

Leveling place

Oldenburg’s third place levels rank. The banker and the bricklayer drink at the same bar.

A loud bar levels class and does not level sensory access. A room can erase every status marker in the building and still sort people by how much noise, light, and crowd their bodies can take. That is the gap the radical third place names. Leveling has to include sensory safety, or it is leveling for the people the room already fits.

Conversation space

Here it breaks.

In the classic third place, the talk is the point. Oldenburg says so in as many words:

In third places, the entertainment is provided by the people themselves. The sustaining activity is conversation which is variously passionate and light-hearted, serious and witty, informative and silly.
Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, p. xxii

Sustaining is the word that matters. Take the conversation away and, by this account, the place stops being one.

For a great many Autistic people — Cavendish among them — that is the price of entry, and it is a price we cannot always pay. NeuroTribes records how his peers at the Monday Club learned to reach him:

“The way to talk to Cavendish is never to look at him,” said astronomer Francis Wollaston, “but to talk as it were into a vacancy, and then it is not unlikely but you may set him going.”
Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes, quoted on our Cavendish Space page

He went to the club. He stood at the edge, listening. He talked when the talk came sideways. He was a regular at a third place on terms the third place had not been designed for.

The Autistic community has names for those terms. Parallel play: being alone together. Body doubling: someone present while you work, not helping, often not speaking. Our pattern for it says it plainly:

Presence is participation. An environment that only counts talking has not measured connection; it has measured one style of it.
Pattern 29 — Parallel Presence

And it is not only us. Writing in the first weeks of lockdown about what his students had lost, educator Chris McNutt of the Human Restoration Project named what he missed about third places himself, and it was not the talk:

Even though I don’t usually interact in these spaces, the feeling of being surrounded by other people … is enlivening.
Chris McNutt, Building a Student-Centered Third Place, 2020

Presence is what a lot of people go to a third place for. The classic account just never counted it.

So a Cavendish third place is a presence space first. Conversation is welcome there. It is not owed. cavendish.space says it about the watering hole, and it is the line we would paint over a third place’s door:

Being near people is the whole point, and joining in stays optional.
What is a Cavendish Space?

Open and accessible

Open hours and a convenient location are where the classic list stops. Cavendish Space starts at the door.

In most environments the biggest barriers are not inside the spaces. They are at the edges between them. (cavendish.space) Our glossary calls the dread that lands at a doorway threshold anxiety, and borrows museum educator Elaine Heumann Gurian’s point that institutions build the barriers that decide who feels allowed in. “Broken thresholds, not broken people.”

A third place is open when you can find out what is behind the door before you open it. When you can watch from the edge first. When you can leave without anyone noticing, and come back next week without having to explain. Cavendish Space calls the small places that make that possible lily pads: “Lily pads turn transitions into places to land.”

Regulars

Regulars are how a place remembers itself. They are also how a place quietly closes.

Cavendish’s Monday Club was a room of regulars, and it worked for him because those regulars adapted to him — they learned to talk into a vacancy. The test of a third place’s regulars is not how warm they are to each other. It is whether they change how they talk so the person at the edge can come in. Regulars who set a culture of psychological safety are the radical part. Regulars who set a culture of in-jokes and volume are a clique with a lease.

Low profile

A third place is unglamorous: plain, unpretentious, not trying to impress. That turns out to be a sensory virtue. Low profile is low stimulation. Cavendish Space calls this layer the habitat — “predictability, sensory safety, navigability, and overall fit” — the steady ground that makes every other zone reachable.

Playful mood

Yes. And for us, play often looks like an infodump, a stim, or two people building separate things side by side. A playful mood that only counts banter misses most of how we play.

Home away from home

Oldenburg, as McNutt quotes him: “Though a radically different kind of setting from the home, the third place is remarkably similar to a good home in the psychological comfort and support that it extends.”

Ira Socol, whom our Cavendish Space page quotes at length, describes a school that must first be a home — “a place that is relentlessly safe, that is both calming and exciting, that offers unconditional love, and that offers boundless opportunity.” A home of opportunity.

That is what a third place is at its best. It is also what Cavendish had at Clapham and almost nobody else does.

Where the coffeehouse fails us

The coffeehouse is the picture most people hold of a third place. It is also the model that open-plan offices borrowed. Annie Murphy Paul, quoted on our Cavendish Space page, names what that model gets wrong:

Perhaps the most important form of control over one’s space is authority over who comes in and out—a point missed by those who believe that our workspaces should resemble a bustling coffeehouse. The informal exchanges facilitated by proximity are indeed generative. But the value of such interactions can be extracted only if it is also possible, when necessary, to avoid interacting at all.
Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind, quoted on our Cavendish Space page

This is the same finding as the research behind intermittent collaboration: people solve hard problems best when time together is punctuated by time apart. The watering hole is generative because there is a cave to go back to.

A third place with no cave is a watering hole with no shade. People can visit. Not everyone can stay.

The library is the third place that already knows this. Our Library page says what it offers:

Quiet corners for deep focus. Tables for gathering. Open floors for wandering. No one checks whether you’re being social correctly. No one asks you to buy something to justify your presence. You are a patron, not a customer.
Library

That is a cave, a campfire, and a watering hole under one roof. That is why so many of us have a library origin story, and so few of us have a pub one.

The estate and the commons

The name Cavendish Space carries an argument. Cavendish could build the conditions he needed because he was rich. His house was his laboratory, his sanctuary, his niche. Without that estate, one of the great scientists of his age might well have ended up on a ward at Bedlam.

So the name carries an argument: the conditions that let a mind work should not require nobility.
What is a Cavendish Space?

The third place is the public version of the estate. It is the room you get without owning one. That is why “without being required to buy stuff” is the line in our glossary that matters most, and why the loss of third places hits Disabled and neurodivergent people first and hardest. When the free room goes, the only Cavendish Space left is the one you can pay for.

We watched that happen to kids’ hobbies at a recent Campfire:

The commons did not lose a fair fight. It was starved first, and then the private version arrived charging four figures a season.
Campfire Learn Together: We’ve Killed Kid’s Hobbies

Our pattern for commons infrastructure names the trap: infrastructure is “the first thing defunded and the last thing credited,” and “an unmaintained commons decays into a monument.” A third place is commons infrastructure. So is a Cavendish Space. Neither survives being treated as a nice extra.

Building them anyway

We are not waiting for cities to build these for us. We are building them where we can — with whatever we have.

On Stimpunks.World, our street of rooms online, every third place is built to the radical list:

A Quiet Pint hangs neutral ground over its door. Every pint comes alcohol-free first, in the same glass, so nobody can tell from across the room what anybody has. Nobody has to order anything to sit down.
The Truck Stop has no price on any board. The trucks hand things out, and nobody asks who you are or why you are hungry.
The Community Library says what it says on our Library page: you are a patron, not a customer.
Cavendish Coworking is a house with a cave, a campfire, and a watering hole upstairs as drop-in rooms. Every door says what its room is for before you knock. Nothing is locked. Inside, you can keep your microphone and camera off and stand off to the side — “which is what the man the house is named after would have done.” Its line on open meetings is the best short summary of this whole piece: “A place can be open without being open-plan.”

Our events work the same way. Campfire Learn Together is named for the zone it is. Infodumplings is a watering hole where the infodump is the conversation.

And the checklist travels. If you run a library, a game shop, a youth club, a church hall, a classroom, or a Discord, ask:

Is there a cave? Somewhere to be alone in company, with no explanation owed.
Is there a campfire? A small group, not a stage.
Is joining in optional? Does presence count as participation?
Can people read the door before they open it? Can they watch from the edge first, and leave without a scene?
Does it cost anything to be there? In money, in a diagnosis, in a login, in performing being social correctly?
Do the regulars change how they talk so someone new can come in?

A post on Autistic communal space, from Play Radical, says what all of this is for in one line:

A true communal space or experience is one where people can be themselves, together.
Communal Space as an Autistic Person, Play Radical

Henry Cavendish had to inherit his. A third place built as a Cavendish Space is the inheritance, shared.