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“Ah, look at all the lonely people.” When The Beatles bemoaned the solitary existence and unmourned death of Eleanor Rigby it was 1966, and a cup of tea would have cost you a few pennies. A chat in a café with the waitress perhaps, or someone at a nearby table, may well have meant a lot to our Eleanor — and she doesn’t come over in the song as a high-net-worth individual.
For a decade or so, I enjoyed engaging with the elderly Eleanors nursing a nice hot cuppa in a café halfway home from my kids’ school. The tea cost a pound and a large plate of ham, egg and chips was a fiver. During the long battering of the British winter, it was cosy in there, a great place for plugging in to what was really going on. The toddlers made the elderly smile. It was heaven — no irritating music, just the sound of human voices — and it even made errands bearable because the café in question was in a branch of our local Sainsbury’s.
That was until the Sainsbury’s café was replaced with a Costa, where the tea will set you back £3.20 and even most of the sandwiches are north of £5. I don’t go any more. Nor do my kids, their friends’ families, nor most of the locals we used to chat to. Sainsbury’s recently announced the closure of all its in-store cafés.
Morrison’s has now followed suit: some of its cafés are to close. And for today’s Eleanor Rigbys it’s not so much, “Where do they all come from”, more, “Where do they all go now?” This year, to bang The Beatles drum again, it really will be a long, cold, lonely winter.
It’s not news that loneliness is a big problem in Britain. A strategy to tackle it, launched by Theresa May’s government in 2018 and somewhat neglected since the last election, has nonetheless produced some useful research. One recent paper called for more “bumping spaces”, for which read informal places to connect, and a particular plea for young and old to be able to mingle. “Seasonality”, it is suggested, has stopped some people from being able to socialise. In other words, when it’s parky out, give us nice warm places to hang out together or we’ll atrophy alone.
A list of companies pledging to support measures to tackle social isolation included Sainsbury’s. The retailer even made a point of publicising that its cafés were a good place for those feeling out in the cold, in all senses, to have a bit of human contact. So much for that. Covid-19 and costs got in the way. Some MPs shared my ire when I railed at the closures on social media. But the number of blank looks from some in Westminster seemed a bit telling. “Let them eat Gail’s,” I guess.
Behind the incomprehension, though, a buzzy phrase offers a bit of hope in the crusade against isolation. If I say “place-making”, what springs to mind? Attractive tableware, a wine glass and maybe even a candle and some flowers? Wrong, my overeager dinner companion. Place-making is, in fact, the art of creating physical spaces that nurture and enrich community life.
And the richest contributions tend to be small-scale. Society has “togetherness or nothing”, as the campaigner Jane Jacobs wrote in her 1961 masterwork The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Most informal interaction, she writes, “is ostensibly utterly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all . . . a web of public respect and trust and a resource in time of personal and neighbourhood need”.
Since the demise of our supermarket cafés, the robot checkouts have proliferated. A daily trip that might once have enabled our imaginary Eleanor to speak to a familiar person as she paid for her shopping, plus a chance to have all that intergenerational contact over a hot, affordable meal, is no more.
Wait! I hear you cry, what about Booths? The north of England’s favourite chichi supermarket still has a café. And it has replaced self checkouts with humans again. Its reason? Customer service. “You can’t do that through a robot,” says the managing director.
Preach, Brother Booth! Planners and politicians need to get on with the place-making, but business could preserve existing bumping spaces. Let’s hope, unlike in the song, this is a sermon that others will hear.
Miranda Green is the FT’s deputy opinion editor
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