Company without an appointment

I had been trying for some time to work out what London has instead of a piazza, and one Sunday in March I was still at it, on a park bench near Elephant & Castle, my corner of the city, when I looked at the coffee in my hand and realised I was conducting the research from inside the answer. Part of the answer, at any rate. Here was a public place I liked well enough to come back to, something to drink, no conspicuous hurry and no need to turn the hour into an achievement. An Italian would have recognised the arrangement, if not the cup.

What I envy in the piazza has less to do with the architecture, lovely as it often is, than with the social ease it makes possible. You put a coffee on the table and something to read beside it, you show no particular sign of being on your way anywhere, and you keep the reasonable expectation that somebody familiar will wander past. The French manage a version of this with their pavement chairs, all turned to face the street, which at least admits what everybody came for. The regulars return to the same seats often enough that familiar company no longer needs arranging, and that is the part I keep coming back to. In London, seeing someone I like usually begins with an exchange of calendars. There it is a side effect of having left the house.

So the bench had answered the easy half of my question and left the harder half standing. I can have the coffee, the book and the unhurried hour almost anywhere in this city that offers a seat and a view. What no bench can supply is recurring company: people who recognise one another, who keep to the same tables and do not need an occasion before they are allowed to meet. That is the part I actually want, and the question had become where London keeps it.

The English would say the pub, and they may well be right, since a pub has regulars if it has anything. But a pub is a room you decide to enter and a piazza is a floor you cross on your way to somewhere else, and I suspect that accounts for most of the difference, because on a floor nobody has to admit to wanting company in order to run into it. London does have squares, although they came to it by another road. Trafalgar Square is open to everyone and belongs, as far as I can tell, to visitors and demonstrations. Many of the handsome ones in Belgravia, Kensington and Notting Hill were laid out as gardens for the people in the surrounding houses, and a good number of them are still behind railings with a key for the residents; for one weekend each June, some admit the rest of us on a ticket. A locked garden in the middle of a great city tells you a fair amount about whom the city was arranged for.

My suspicion is that the life of the piazza has been distributed, some of it to pubs, some to cafés and parks, and some to private arrangements that nobody else can see. I know about those because I have one. A good friend and I keep a standing dinner, the same evening each week. There is no birthday to justify it, no diary negotiation and nothing to organise, and neither of us ever has to be the one who asks. It is simply on, and I find that more restful than I can easily explain. The decision was taken once and has not had to be taken again, which changes what the evening is, because it has become part of the week rather than a plan we may or may not manage. A square gives a whole neighbourhood somewhere to develop the same habit. Our version seats two.

The easy half of the question requires nobody’s cooperation, and I take it more seriously than is probably reasonable. That same March the forecast promised 17 or perhaps 18 degrees and sun, the warmest day of the year so far, so I took the day off: an actual vacation day, for weather. We Dutch have a word for this, terrasweer, terrace weather. The rule of thumb is 18 degrees, although in March the terraces will fill at 16, so by the standards I was raised with this was not a close call. A London March offers very few such invitations, and spending this one indoors would have been a ridiculous act of thrift.

The plan was modest on purpose: Regent’s Canal, tea outside, lunch, a book and as much sun as the day could supply. Lunch came from home, salmon and vegetables in a Tupperware, which I would ask you not to mention in Italy. I wore trousers that would tolerate hours of walking and put a Drake’s scarf in my pocket for the moment the forecast lost confidence.

Regent’s Canal suits this kind of day because it contains too much London to become pretty in the postcard sense. It opened in 1820 to move timber, coal and building materials around the top of the city, and the towpath was made for the horses that pulled the barges, so one of the most agreeable walks in London owes nothing to anybody’s idea of a walk. That seems to be how this city provides for its idlers: by accident, in the margins of its commerce. Narrowboats, brick, the domestic backs of buildings, sudden green, cyclists, cafés and water barely moving all go by, and the neighbourhood changes without your ever quite leaving the path. I do not drive, so a day outside has to work by bus or on foot, and the canal offers distance without trapping me at the far end of it.

Along a route like that, the benches decide what is available to you. A bench with water in view and no urgent claim on the person using it is worth changing a route for, not least because it is one of the few seats in London that will never ask what you are having. I stopped three times, once to read, once for lunch and once simply because the water and the narrowboats were there. With nothing scheduled, taking my time was the point, and I loved it.

Reading outside sounds effortless until glare, the weight of the bag, noise, the shortage of anywhere comfortable to sit and the moment when warmth turns into wind have all joined the afternoon. None of this is difficult; it merely rewards attention. Lunch that travels, clothes with some range and a route with easy exits keep the day pleasant, and I enjoy getting them right more than I can entirely defend. I learned the pleasure of being capable outdoors as a Sea Scout, reading weather and water in small boats, and it survives perfectly well at this reduced scale, where the stakes are whether to bring the scarf.

Late May brought a rare heatwave at the end of a week of long workdays, and I used the arrangement again. Linen this time, water bought along the way, the bus instead of the Tube, as always on hot days, and for the green the Garden Museum in Lambeth, a deconsecrated church beside Lambeth Palace with Captain Bligh of the Bounty buried in its garden. I kept the day loose, with buses nearby and no obligation to complete a route. What had been a small expedition in March now required almost no thought: linen, water, the bus, a book and somewhere green.

So I now have a reliable weekly table and a reliable outdoor ritual, which between them supply most of what I envied in the piazza, except that they have never been in the same place. London may well keep its piazza life in dozens of smaller arrangements like these, each invisible from the others, which would explain how a person can sit in the middle of it on a bench with a coffee and not notice. What I have not yet found is the place where such habits meet, where returning often enough turns strangers into regulars and nobody has to make an appointment. I intend to keep looking, weather permitting.

Chris Chabot, May 2026