A Matter of Space: Cultural Distances in the UK — Epoche B2
Five people outside a Co-op The train from Paddington takes about ninety minutes to Moreton-in-Marsh, and the bus from there into the villages takes another thirty, which is how I came to spend a quarter of an hour standing at a stop outside a Co-op with four other people, all of us arranged along the pavement like books on a shelf with the ends missing. Nobody spoke. Nobody stood nearer than about a metre from anyone else. When a fifth person arrived, she did not join the end of the line — she took up a position slightly apart, and the whole formation quietly re-spaced itself to accommodate her. It took perhaps two seconds and nobody looked up from their phone. I had come to the Cotswolds for the reason everyone comes: the villages are built from a honey-coloured limestone that turns almost orange in low sun, and in April the churchyards are full of cowslips. I ended up thinking about pavements instead. Why one arrival moves everybody The re-spacing is worth doing the arithmetic for, because it explains why a single arrival disturbs people who are nowhere near her. What a group of people standing in a line preserves is not their distance from the newcomer but the gaps between neighbours, and the number of gaps in a line of $n$ people is $n-1$, not $n$ — the person at each end has a neighbour on one side only. Four people therefore share three gaps; five people share four. Suppose the usable stretch of pavement in front of the shop is about three metres long. With four people the spacing is $$s=\frac{L}{n-1}=\frac{3\ \mathrm{m}}{3}=1\ \mathrm{m},$$ which is roughly what I saw. Add a fifth person to the same stretch and the spacing falls to $3/4 = 0.75\ \mathrm{m}$. To hold the metre, the line has to lengthen instead: four gaps at one metre need $L = 4\ \mathrm{m}$. That is what the two-second shuffle was — not politeness towards the newcomer, but everyone recovering a gap that her arrival had mathematically shortened. It also explains why the adjustment propagates: because the constraint is on gaps rather than on absolute positions, a change at one end of the line requires movement all the way along it. Breakfast at a single long table Having noticed the rule, I asked the people I was staying with about it. The bed and breakfast was a seventeenth-century weaver's cottage with doorways built for shorter people, run by Mary and John, who have lived in the same village their whole lives and who serve breakfast at a single long table — which is itself a small social experiment, because it obliges strangers to sit closer than any of them would choose. On my second morning I asked them about it directly. Mary was quite certain there is a British distance and that it is larger than most. "You'll have noticed it in a queue," she said, buttering toast. "There's a gap you leave. Too close and you'll get a look — not a word, mind, a look." John's view was that it is not really about space at all but about not obliging anyone to acknowledge you. "If I stand an arm's length away, you can pretend I'm not there, and I can pretend you're not there, and we can both get on with our morning." He said this as though describing a courtesy, which, on reflection, it is. I asked what happens when a visitor stands closer — someone from a culture where conversational distance is half a metre rather than a full one. Mary thought it was rarely taken as rudeness, but that the British response is almost never verbal. "We step back," she said. "Or we turn slightly, so we're not quite facing you. And then of course you step forward, because you're being perfectly normal, and we step back again, and by the end of it we've crossed the room." John said he had once retreated the entire length of a parish hall during a conversation with a very friendly Italian violin teacher and had not noticed until his back met the wall. What Hall measured, and on whom Two of their three claims have a literature behind them, and it is worth seeing exactly what that literature establishes. The study of how people use the space around them has a name, proxemics, given to it by the American anthropologist Edward Hall in 1963 and set out in The Hidden Dimension three years later. Hall's proposal was that the distance between two bodies is not accidental but a channel of communication, organised into bands. He set out four: Intimate , from contact to about 45 cm — touching, whispering, the smell of the other person. Personal , from about 45 cm to 120 cm — the distance for friends and for ordinary conversation, the far edge of it being roughly arm's length plus a little. Social , from about 1.2 m to 3.7 m — business, strangers, the counter in a shop. Public , beyond about 3.7 m — lecturing, addressing, no expectation of reply. Hall wrote in feet: his conversational band ends at four feet, which is 1.22 m, and the intimate band ends at eighteen inches, or 46 cm. The metre I measured at the bus stop therefore sits at the top of his personal band, just short of the social one — that is, strangers at a bus stop stand at the outer limit of the distance he associated with people who know one another. What his numbers rest on is the part usually left out. Hall derived them from observation and interviews with a narrow population: middle-class adults, largely white, in the north-eastern United States. He said so, and warned explicitly against treating the bands as facts about the human body rather than about a particular culture's use of it. The essay's earlier claim that he treated the figures as a cultural variable is right, and it is the reason his framework cannot by itself confirm anything Mary said. Is the British distance really larger? Mary's specific claim — that the British keep more space than most — can now be tested, and it does not survive well. Agnieszka Sorokowska and a large group of collaborators asked nearly nine thousand people in forty-two countries how close they would stand to a stranger, to an acquaintance and to someone close t