THE WATERHOLE
Across cultures and centuries, humans have always needed places to gather. Places to talk, laugh, argue, flirt, listen, and share stories. In the modern world, two such places stand out: the city bar and the country pub.
On the surface, they might seem very different—one buzzing with urban energy, the other nestled in pastoral quiet. But beneath these differences lies a shared function that is deeply human, even biological: they are our waterholes.
The Social and Biological Waterhole
The metaphor of the waterhole is not accidental. In nature, waterholes are gathering places. Animals who might otherwise remain solitary or territorial congregate at watering sites. Predators and prey come to drink, risking uneasy truces in the name of survival. The waterhole is an arena of encounter and negotiation—a place of both vulnerability and community.
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar, in Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships (2021), discusses how human social structures evolved around small groups, bonded through conversation, laughter, and shared rituals. He notes that in primate societies, grooming is the core social glue—humans replaced this with conversation. The pub and the bar are modern grooming sites: spaces for social maintenance.
Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in Space and Place (1977) reminds us that place is not merely physical space, but space endowed with meaning through human experience. Bars and pubs transform anonymous buildings into places of memory, ritual, and belonging.
As someone who has worked for years as a bar owner, operator, landlord, designer, bartender, and frequent customer, I’ve seen these dynamics play out at every level. I’ve poured the pints and cleared the tables, welcomed strangers and soothed arguments, designed the lighting and chosen the chairs, all with one goal in mind: to create a space where people feel they can gather.
The City Bar: Negotiating Difference
In the city, the bar plays a special role. It is often a place of friction and diversity—where people of different backgrounds, professions, and beliefs share space, sometimes uncomfortably, often productively.
Urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg describes the bar as a classic “third place” in The Great Good Place (1989): not home (first place) or work (second place), but a semi-public social realm where people can relax, exchange ideas, and feel part of a community.
City bars negotiate anonymity and intimacy. You might sit next to a stranger and strike up a conversation, or retreat quietly with friends in a dark corner. They offer social flexibility—a venue for dating, arguing politics, watching football, or simply being alone together.
In my experience as a designer and operator, these spaces have to balance complexity. They need to feel open enough to invite strangers in, but intimate enough to make regulars feel at home. Every choice—from bar height to music volume to lighting temperature—affects how people connect.
And they are human precisely because they are analogue. Despite the rise of dating apps, social media, and remote work, city bars remain stubbornly physical. The drink in hand, the music in the background, the glance across the room—these are sensory, embodied experiences that resist digitisation.
The Country Pub: Reinforcing Belonging
By contrast, the country pub often serves a more rooted function. It is the social hub of its village or rural community—a place where local identity is reinforced rather than negotiated.
The country pub is where local news is exchanged, disputes settled, relationships maintained. It’s where farmers, tradespeople, newcomers, and old-timers find common ground.
Yet even here, I’ve seen that this “slow life” idea can be misleading. Rural communities can be close-knit but also complex, negotiating change, diversity, and economic pressures. The country pub can be both welcoming and gatekeeping—a place where belonging is defined and policed.
As a landlord, I’ve watched these dynamics up close. The pub can be the warm hearth at the centre of village life, but it requires real work to maintain that openness. You learn to listen, to mediate, to read the room instinctively. It’s a kind of social choreography that can’t be automated.
But in its best form, the country pub is the human waterhole. It offers ritual and familiarity. It slows time enough to notice one another, to taste, to listen. It invites people to put down their tools or close their laptops, and simply be present.
A Place to Taste
Both the city bar and the country pub are also places of taste—literally and figuratively. We gather not just to drink but to savour. To appreciate a perfectly pulled pint, a creative cocktail, a local cider. Taste is a profoundly human sense: personal, cultural, social.
Sharing a drink is one of the oldest human rituals. It is an offering of hospitality, an invitation to trust. The glass is raised, eye contact made, a silent agreement formed: we are together here.
As a bartender, I know that serving a drink is never just a transaction. It’s an invitation to connect. A gesture of care, however small.
Resisting the Digital
In an age of remote interactions, algorithmic feeds, and virtual friendships, these places matter more than ever. They are stubbornly physical, defiantly analogue. They require us to share space, to read faces, to listen.
They remind us that human community is built not on efficiency but on encounter. Not on optimisation but on negotiation. Not on profit alone but on connection.
As a designer, I believe our task is to hold space for these experiences. To shape places that invite conversation, that encourage stillness and sociability in equal measure, that honour the subtle art of human interaction.
Conclusion: The Waterhole Within Society
In the end, whether urban or rural, the bar and the pub share a fundamental purpose. They are our waterholes. Places where social life is replenished. Places of vulnerability and safety. Places of laughter, argument, flirtation, and solace.
They are human places—messy, noisy, imperfect, and beautifully resistant to being coded or commodified.
If we want to keep our communities alive—if we want to remain truly human in an age of technological acceleration—we would do well to cherish them. To step inside, order a drink, take a seat. To listen. To taste. To belong.
References
Robin Dunbar, Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships, 2021.
Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, 1989.
Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, 1977