This week's outing was to Covent Garden, a place I had been several times before, but I quickly realized we were seeing much more of it than I had even realized existed.
Covent Garden is overall a predominantly semi-public space, as there are mainly stores and restaurants and even the Actors Church that are open for certain hours of the day, but closed at night. Certain behavior is not explicitly stated, but generally understood, as it is a dignified area where behavior such as violence or lack of clothing or disruption of the general peace and public wouldn't be tolerated by passersby or by those in authority of the establishments.
Trafalgar Square, for example, is a much more public space with much less requirements on behavior. I could go to Trafalgar Square in minimal clothing and nobody would say anything to me about it. When we were there last week, there were men without shirts on and women who were in very little clothing, and nobody said a word about it. If those men had tried to go into a shop at Covent Garden, I'm confident they would have been turned away and asked to leave so as to maintain the proper reputation of the stores. Trafalgar Square doesn't close at certain hours of the night, and a variety of activities can take place there, as there is a less clearly defined purpose of what the space is for, unlike at Covent Garden where the space is clearly primarily for shopping and dining and socializing.
The Actors Church functions as a semi-public space in that it was totally open to the public during the day, and we were able to freely roam about, view the memorials to various actors, sit in the pews, talk, take pictures, etc. My professor even mentioned the last time she visited, a homeless man was sleeping on a pew. The space is open to the public to be enjoyed and appreciated as the memorial that it is to famous and not-so-famous members of the theatre community. The church is closed in the evenings and is only open for a few hours on the weekends, presumably to keep out more of the homeless community and to maintain the cleanliness and purpose of the church as a reverent place of homage and worship.
The second part of our outing was to the Charles Dickens Coffee House. We had discussed the coffee house culture at great lengths during our class time, and I was really intrigued by it. London had thousands of coffee houses back in the day, and they were meeting places for conversation and discussion and people to come together and debate matters of importance and public good. Newspapers were born in these places, too, and were another means of discussion and sharing information. France had salons that met in the homes of people involved, where similar debates and conversations were held. When asked what America had that was similar to these coffee houses and salons, I really couldn't think of an answer.
Yes, America has coffee houses. But when you go to them, you mostly find individuals on their laptops or iPhones, grabbing a quick cup of coffee. You rarely find groups of intellectuals discussing important matters and debating politics and social issues and such. Where do we go to do this? Or has America become so consumed by our individual technologies that we all are lost in our own worlds of the devices in front of us that we are losing the art of conversation and debate?
The Charles Dickens Coffee House is small and quaint, and my professor has established a personal relationship with the Egyptian man who works there. He knew her as soon as we walked in, and was delighted to see us and to meet me and to hear where I was from. It was such a warm welcome, unlike any I would get at a Starbucks back home. It was so much less about the coffee I was ordering, and more about the relationship between he and I and my professor and Rusty. I loved and appreciated it.
He brought us our drinks downstairs where we were the only people in the musty smelling room downstairs full of tables and chairs. He even brought us a plate of a chocolate dessert, completely on him. When would a Starbucks employee treat you to a dessert because you were a valued customer and familiar friend?
At Starbucks when I go to just catch up with my friends and actually discuss movies we've seen and books we've read, which in essence mimics what the London coffee houses used to be home to, we have always been asked to leave after a good chunk of time goes by. The mentality is get in, buy coffee, get out. We could have stayed for hours at the Charles Dickens Coffee House, talking about everything under the sun. We probably would have been checked up on, perhaps offered more food or drink, and treated as welcome guests, not just consumers that need to leave so other consumers can consume.
At JMU, I love spending time at a place called TDU (Taylor Down Under), where there's a Java City coffee place, pool tables, lots of couches, and tons of tables and chairs scattered around a stage where open mic nights take place, people can play piano if they wish, or put coins in the jukebox to play music, too. There are always people meeting for lunch dates or coffee dates, and there are always tons of conversations going on. It's the closest thing I've experience to the coffee house culture, and I love being there. I spend hours talking with friends about the things I've been reading or studying in my Bible studies, or just catching up on life, or discussing current events and things going on in the world around us, and I always leave feeling invigorated and excited about life.
I think that's the whole point of the coffee house culture- bringing people together, bringing private individuals together to form a public body, creating public opinion and fueling social change and working together for the public good. London's original coffee houses are all gone, but the culture of them still remains in the local coffee shops all around the city and beyond. I love that about being here in London, and I'll continue to seek it out back in the states as well.
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