THIRTY years ago two little-known American sociologists, Ramon Oldenburg and Dennis Brissett, coined the term “third place” to describe the locations – other than home and work – that make up our social habitat. They mourned what they saw as a loss of opportunities for informal socialising in a world where people shuttled between home and work, increasingly cut off from wider social contacts.

Oldenburg’s book, The Great Good Place, extolled the virtues of hairdressing salons, coffee shops, bars, bookstores – the sorts of local places where “unrelated people relate.” If his catalogue of interests seemed eccentric at the time, it wasn’t long before writers like Michael Porter, Robert Putnam and Richard Florida began to take an interest in the ways in which social networks sustain economic, political and civic life. For these writers, though, third places were mostly a backdrop for larger stories of regional and national competitiveness, and the decline of trust and social capital…