Doing Starbucks Differently

It's very easy to make the argument that British society and culture are stultifying and homogenising; talk a walk through your town or city centre and chances are, you will be seeing the same shopfronts as would anybody else walking in their town centres. In terms of cafes, a cursory glance through Doncaster town centre yields Starbucks, Costa and Nero, as does Cambridge. The staff outfits are the same. The tables and chairs are the same. The background music is the same. The drinks are the same.

But the Starbucks experience is different. Starbucks Doncaster and Starbucks Cambridge, despite their aesthetic similarities, each reflect back the characteristics of the micro-cultures and norms of the locations in which they are situated. This irrevocably alters the normative behaviours of Starbucks and, as I found today, subtle differences in expectation alter the ways in which people practice Starbucks.

For me, Starbucks is first and foremost an overpriced, noisy thinking space. The silence of libraries sets off my internal monologues, or even worse my internal singing of Rihanna's 'Unfaithful'. So off I toddle to Starbucks with a backpack full of laptop, books, articles, notepads and my portable foldable lectern (yes, yes, I know).

In the Cambridge Starbucks on Market Square, you can go in for your morning coffee at 8am, safe in the knowledge that it will be packed out with students. People's shoes come off as they settle themselves, mocha in hand, for a cross-legged power-read of Austen, or Bourdieu or whoever. If the music stopped, all you would hear is the scribbling of pen and paper and the whirring of laptops - the soundtrack to a lecture hall. Buying your 8am coffee and croissant justifies your occupation of a table for the rest of the morning. Friends work together in silence, each doing their own work.

I naively entered Doncaster Starbucks today with similar expectations. I skulked around the store in the quest to find plugsockets and was alarmed to find there were only 3. I got a Chai Latte and perched myself at a table, plugged in my laptop, whipped out my two notebooks and placed them on a chair. I would have benefitted from the lectern, but I knew it would cause too much of a fuss. I became aware, as I worked away, that I was receiving quite hostile glares from other customers, as if to ask why I thought I could monopolise a table with my books. People stick around in Starbucks far less in Donk than in Cam; they drink it down and leave.

On Maslow's hierarchy, Doncaster Starbucks satisfies the physiological need, whereas in Cambridge Starbucks it is all about self-actualisation.

Ultimately, this reflects the way in which citizens of each town utilise and interact with their built environment. For the Cambridge students, whose disposable income is boosted either by parents or by bursaries, the town centre isn't just a place full of shops but is the place where they live, learn, sleep, socialise and rest. Thus, in Starbucks as one of the few places,there are a multiplicity of functions that can be served.

But for Doncaster, the town centre represents solely a place of commerce. Shopping is not conducive to leisure, certainly not to leisurely academia. The way in which Starbucks is used is as a break between shops.

This explains why people looked at me today as though I was a table-hogging twat.

Doncaster and the National News

OK, I've had another experience of deja vu. Once again I'm at University down south and have stumbled upon a link to a news item, from the BBC News at Six, about Doncaster on the BBC. Experience has taught me to quell my hopeful optimism for a positive story of any sort - it won't be about a child who has learnt to walk on a prosthetic limb, a tale of a dog that rides the bus every day or about the town's new ranking as the Cosmopolitian Town of Culture. Nothing positive.

Since my being at university, Doncaster has been in the national news for these things. Peter Davies - a controversial English Democrat (?) who is seen to oppose the rights of homosexuals, who is against diversity and is concocting a war on politial correctness - was elected as mayor. Two boys aged 10 and 11 tortured, attacked, sexually abused and left for dead two other boys aged 9 and 11. A drug addict father murdered his baby daughter by snapping her spine over his knee. Doncaster Children's Services were rated among the very worst in the country, as bad as Haringey, home of Baby P, and it has since been taken over by the central government.

All chirpy stuff I'm sure you'll agree...

But what I think now, is that the BBC may possibly be constructing a misleadingly negative view of our town. Nobody is saying Donny is the Garden of Eden, but it's not quite as bad as recent news items show it. Today for example, the BBC chose to show a piece about the Question Time with Nick Griffin from Doncaster, with its reporter roving around the town's particularly bad shit holes. The BNP have never been elected in Doncaster... why Doncaster? Because the media is appropriating Doncaster to become its symbolic town of decay? Maybe?

Every time I see this happen, I'll do another post like this one.

These are the images from today's piece - I don't think I need to say too much about the images themselves, but for a piece which lasted little over 2 minutes, there was a high density of pushchairs, prams, boarded up shops, mud and grey. The first image below shows a social club with the camera shot taken through a muddy puddle - Buckingham Palace would look pretty dirty if the image was taken with the lens placed by a strategically chosen lump of dogshit. Shots like this are really misrepresenting Donny. Doncaster really isn't great, but it's not like this...

Intake, Doncaster is full of tramps!

Trampolines, to give them their proper name. Who knew?!

I'm currently reading Lynsey Hanley's book 'Estates: An Intimate History', about the development of council housing in Britain and what the social and psychological effects of the architecture have on those living in them. I'm sure that once I've finished the book I'll have something more comprehensive to say, which will probably warrant its own blogpost.

In the part I've just read, she mentions the ideal of new postwar council estates as suburban 'Garden Cities' and this got me to thinking quite how much greenery was built into Intake, the estate where I've lived all my life. Quite bizarrely, in Google searching Intake, I stumbled across this piece of research by the National Trust of Australia, which examines the social reality of living in council estates and which used Doncaster as its case study.

http://www.nsw.nationaltrust.org.au/conservation/files/Suburbia%20Hughes%20Owen.pdf

Yet more amazingly, there is a diagram of Intake in its strange symmetrical glory. I've never seen a map and was quite astounded to see it's shape, and quite how obviously artificial and 'planned' it is, as opposed to neighbourhoods which quite gradually develop over time.



Allow this to be a taster of what is to come - I intend to look in more depth at Intake as a Garden City once I've read the books completely. I was speculatively looking on Google Maps at the area and I noticed something far more unexpected.

Practically half the houses in Intake have trampolines! It was quite strange looking at the map as back garden after back garden had a black circle with blue trim. I'm not quite sure why its so strange to me - I could blame 'Keeping up with the Joneses' I suppose. It just doesn't make sense to me - I've never heard any talk of trampolining as a hobby. I appreciate, with blissful retrospect, the joys of jumping (both up and down) but its the sheer number of houses. Knutsford has swimming pools and Intake has trampolines. Amazing. Here are some of the unexpected findings.




What can explain this odd phenomenon?! I had a quick peruse of neighbouring and local council areas like Edlington, and didn't find nearly as many. Who'd have thought that Google Earth, which can map the world, would only become interesting to me once I look from above at what is pretty much outside of my window.

Being at Home

I'm puzzled by the fact that I am drinking a lot more alcohol, a lot more frequently, at home rather than at uni. There seems to be no logical reason for this; at least none that jumps out, so I'm going to have a thoughtsplurge (my neologism) all over this fresh little blog.
At university, I am free to do whatever I want whenever I want, theoretically. Before uni, one of the main reasons I would give to myself for why I don't go 'out round town' was that my parents would bemoan me coming in late. I think even then I knew there was an element of pseudo-consideration going on there, but this is beside the point.

Why am I drinking more? At first, independence appears to be the reason, though sure then I would drink more when at Uni than now - now that I am once more cozened in the parental influence. So maybe then it is some level of consciousness that permeates into my sense of independence - a 'self aware independence'. I am here aware that I am independent and am hence able to drink as an act of maturity inflation - castigating my child-self?

I'm not even remotely like an alcoholic and I'm sure my drinking habits are actually pretty close to the norm - maybe even below it - but it's all relative I suppose. This is an on-going thought - this whole idea of the paradoxical Doncaster/Cambridge self is quite perplexing. In fact, forget sleep, I will do this.

OK, when I first got to Uni, in Freshers Week etc, I was striving to not be typecast as a Northerner. I am pleased to be 'du Nord' but I don't and didn't then want it to become me. So at first I was in a weird flux where I was trying to be this 'Cambridge' type I didn't yet know nor understand.

As the term went on, I became much more self assured - I enjoyed the modest eccentricity of allowing my bizarre hair to wreak havoc and grow in what can only be called a horizontal style. I found it easy to make small talk and banter; vodka helped this, but it became less of a necessity as the weeks went by. What started to emerge was a sense of my Doncaster identity moulding itself into the Cambridge form. The occasional vulgar joke or three about murder, snobbery and rape became more possible as I became less self-regulatory. This is good; liberating and character building. This was the second stage.

The third stage is what I am experiencing presently, and it is arguably the easiest and most enjoyable. Now in a stage in which Doncastrian personality and cheekiness has branded itself alongside a Cambridge sense of eccentricity, outspokenness and the insatiable appetite for challenge, it is the end of term and time to return to Doncaster. It seems pathetically predictable that change would come; silly to think it was only 8 weeks. But here, one can bask in the provincial glory of having left the province and returned willingly. Coming home serves to rejuvenate the ego that may take a battering in such a friendly yet blatantly competitive environment at uni. Coming home, people you know can hear about all the quirky things you've done and the people you've met and how everything is so much different [read better]. Coming home is like staring into the lake of Narcissus - lovingly gazing back is the altered you, altering yet more so simply by being self-aware.

As for the next stage, I predict going back will be very interesting in a social psychology sort of way. All of the qualms and worried that accompanied the first term have been quashed. I predict a heightened sense of self-worth amongst the majority, coupled with the amalgamation of many new years resolutions founded upon status anxiety and raw ambition. I can barely wait.