The Spaces Between
If you live in Devon, you probably know the feeling. You finish work — perhaps at the kitchen table, perhaps at an office in Exeter or Plymouth — and you look at your evening stretching ahead. You could stay in. You could scroll your phone. You could, theoretically, go somewhere. But where?
The pub down the road closed eighteen months ago. The village shop shut before that. The nearest community centre runs a toddler group on Tuesdays and a Parish Council meeting once a month, but nothing that quite fits what you are looking for: a place to simply be, around other people, without needing a reason or an invitation.
This is the third place problem. And in Devon, it is acute.
We wrote previously about the death of the third place across Britain — the disappearance of pubs, libraries, community centres, and informal gathering spaces that once formed the backbone of social life. But Devon faces a version of this crisis that is uniquely shaped by its geography, its demographics, and its particular blend of rural beauty and rural isolation.
This is not a lament. It is an argument — and a practical guide — for doing something about it.
What Third Places Are and Why They Matter
The American sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term "third place" in his 1989 book The Great Good Place. He defined it as a generic designation for the great variety of public places that host regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.
Home is your first place. Work is your second. The third place is everything else — the pub, the café, the library, the park bench, the barber shop, the church hall on a Wednesday evening. These are the spaces where community happens not by design but by habit. Where you bump into your neighbour, overhear a conversation, and gradually — through the simple act of showing up — become known.
Oldenburg identified several characteristics that all genuine third places share. They are on neutral ground. They level social hierarchies. Conversation is the main activity. The mood is playful and warm. Regulars give the space its character, but newcomers are welcome. There is no admission fee, no membership requirement, no dress code. You simply show up.
For generations, these spaces were the fabric of Devon life. The village pub. The market square. The church hall. The post office where you queued for stamps and left with gossip. They were not designed as social infrastructure. They just were. And now, at a pace that should alarm us all, they are disappearing.
Devon's Particular Challenge
Devon is one of England's largest counties and one of its most rural. That is part of its appeal — the rolling hills, the quiet lanes, the sense of space and escape that draws people here from all over the country. But that same rurality creates a social infrastructure challenge that urban areas simply do not face.
In a city, if your local pub closes, there are three more within walking distance. In rural Devon, the nearest alternative might be a fifteen-minute drive — assuming you have a car, assuming you are comfortable driving at night on unlit lanes, and assuming the next pub has not also closed.
Freedom of Information requests compiled by the Country Land and Business Association in 2025 found thousands of pubs, shops, bus routes and services closing across rural England in a single year. In West Devon specifically, empty commercial properties reached 172 — the district's highest figure in a decade. The pattern is consistent: the pub closes, then the shop, then the post office. Each closure removes a gathering point, a reason to leave the house, an opportunity to see another human being face to face.
In the first half of 2025, 209 pubs in England and Wales were demolished or converted to other uses — eight a week, up from six a week in 2024, on British Beer and Pub Association figures. For rural communities where the pub is often the last remaining communal space, each closure represents the loss of something that cannot easily be replaced.
Devon Community Foundation's work on rural disadvantage describes persistent pockets of deprivation in the county's coastal towns and rural communities, particularly around housing, access to services and health outcomes, with social isolation among the challenges named. North and West Devon face particular difficulty, compounded by low wages, a high cost of living, and distance from services.
The Rural England report on isolation put it plainly: services available in small rural communities are often extremely limited. The absence of shops, post offices, and pubs limits opportunities for interactions, while the lack of public transport creates further obstacles. For older residents, for people without cars, for anyone who has recently moved to the area, the absence of a third place can mean the absence of community altogether.
The Pub: More Than a Place to Drink
It is worth pausing on pubs specifically, because in Devon — as across rural Britain — the pub has historically played a role that goes far beyond selling drinks.
The village pub was a post office, an information exchange, a meeting room, an emergency contact point, a place to watch the match, a venue for the harvest supper, and — most importantly — a place where you could walk in alone and leave feeling less so. It was the place where the farmer and the schoolteacher and the retired postman and the new family from Bristol all occupied the same space and, over time, became a community.
Polling published by the British Beer and Pub Association in October 2025 found that 67% of Britons view pubs as vital for tackling loneliness and isolation, and that one in three said they or someone they know had felt lonelier after losing their local. Two in five had seen a closure in their own area.
When a village pub closes in Devon, the community does not just lose a business. It loses its living room. And unlike a shop or a bank, which can be replaced by an online service, the social function of a pub cannot be digitised. You cannot replicate the experience of walking into a familiar room, being greeted by name, and settling into a conversation that picks up where it left off last week. That is something that only happens in person, in a specific place, over time.
Devon's Community Pub Success Stories
But here is the part of the story that deserves more attention: some communities in Devon have fought back. And they have won.
The Tally Ho in Littlehempston is the best-known example. The pub shut in 2011 and faced conversion to a private house; supporters raised the money to buy it and reopened it in 2014 as South Devon's first community-owned pub. It won South Devon CAMRA's Pub of the Year in 2022. In September 2023 the co-operative sold the pub to its tenants, Kelly and Mike Joiner, who run it today — so it is no longer community-owned, but the community saved it, kept it open for nearly a decade and handed it on as a going concern. That is a success, not a failure.
In Holcombe Rogus, residents from the village and the neighbouring communities of Hockworthy, Westleigh and Burlescombe raised funds towards buying the Prince of Wales and turning it into a community pub, café and shop, with support from Plunkett. In the event the pub was bought and reinvested in by a private owner rather than the community group, and it trades today. Community campaigns do not always end in community ownership; they do often end with the doors open.
Nationally, community-led pubs have a strong track record. Plunkett reports more than 210 community-owned pubs trading across the UK, with 23 opening in 2025 and a long-term survival rate of around 99% — far above the norm for small businesses. That should give every village in Devon facing the loss of its local reason to believe an alternative is possible.
Plunkett UK is the specialist organisation here: it advises community groups on share offers, governance and funding, and has supported community pub projects across the country, including in Devon. Your district council and Devon County Council are the next call after that.
If your village pub is under threat, registering it as an Asset of Community Value with your local council gives the community a six-month window to put together a bid if the building comes up for sale. It is not a guarantee, but it is a powerful tool — and it starts with a single application.
Beyond the Pub: Reimagining Devon's Village Halls
Devon Communities Together supports more than 400 village halls and community buildings across the county — an extraordinary network of potential third places. Many sit empty for much of the week. Many need investment in heating, accessibility, and facilities. But the buildings exist, and their potential is enormous.
Devon Communities Together, the charity that has supported Devon's community buildings since 1961, has been leading work to reimagine village halls as multi-use community hubs, rather than draughty rooms available for hire — spaces that could host community cafés, remote working, family support groups and, yes, social dining.
The Hallmark Quality Standard — created by the Community Council of Somerset, developed nationally by ACRE, and revived in Devon by Devon Communities Together — gives halls a three-level framework for improving governance, safety and social value. It is a practical programme that helps committees, usually volunteers, bring their buildings into the 21st century.
This matters because Devon's village halls represent something rare: community-owned, community-managed spaces in the places where they are needed most. They do not require the commercial viability of a pub or the foot traffic of a café. They just need people with ideas, energy, and a willingness to open the doors.
Creating Third Places Where None Exist
Here is the challenge, and it is an honest one: in many parts of rural Devon, there is no pub to save and no village hall to repurpose. The infrastructure simply does not exist. So what do you do?
You create third places yourself.
This is not as radical as it sounds. A third place does not have to be a building. It is a concept — a regular, voluntary, informal gathering of people in a shared space. A monthly supper club in someone's kitchen is a third place. A weekly walking group that finishes at a farm shop café is a third place. A book club that meets in the back room of the local bakery is a third place. A dinner event at a restaurant in Exeter where strangers become friends is a third place.
The key ingredients are consistency, accessibility, and a low barrier to entry. People need to know when and where it happens. They need to feel welcome. And they need it to happen regularly enough that the relationships built there have time to deepen.
In Exeter, the Creating Connections social café — run by Exeter City Community Trust every Tuesday from 10.30am to noon at the Grecian Centre at St James Park — shows what this looks like in practice. A simple, consistent, open gathering where anyone can turn up and spend time with others in a relaxed environment, with games, quizzes, crafts and guest speakers through the year.
St Sidwell's Community Centre, an independent secular charity open since 2001, runs a community café, a bakery on Sidwell Street, a cookery school and a community garden, and acts as a heritage hub for the eastern quarter of the city centre. The Beacon Community Centre in Beacon Heath hosts adult social groups, craft sessions, a food bank and a Friday café from 10am to noon in a hall with pool tables, sofas and a jigsaw table. These are not grand civic projects. They are small, human-scaled spaces doing exactly what Oldenburg described: hosting regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings.
How You Can Help
If you have read this far and feel moved to act, here are concrete things you can do to help create or protect third places in Devon.
Protect what exists. If your local pub or community space is under threat, find out whether it can be registered as an Asset of Community Value. Attend parish council meetings. Make noise. The spaces that survive are almost always the ones where someone cared enough to fight for them.
Use your village hall. If your local hall is underused, talk to the committee about starting something new. A monthly quiz night. A supper club. A community breakfast. These spaces belong to their communities, and they come alive when people use them.
Start a regular gathering. You do not need a building or a budget. You need a time, a place, and the willingness to show up consistently. A monthly dinner at someone's home. A fortnightly walk-and-talk group. A rotating supper club where a different person hosts each time. The format matters less than the regularity.
Support community businesses. Every time you choose the local café over the chain, the independent pub over staying in, the village shop over the online order, you are investing in the social infrastructure of your community. These businesses are third places, and they survive on the custom of the people around them.
Join something that already exists. Dinners With Friends exists precisely because we believe that the dinner table can be a sanctuary — a place where strangers become acquaintances and acquaintances become friends. Our events across Devon bring together people who want genuine connection over good food, in beautiful settings, without the pressure of organising it themselves. If you have been thinking about it, come. The table is set.
If Third Places Do Not Exist, Create Them
Devon is a county of extraordinary beauty and genuine warmth. The people here — whether born in Barnstaple or recently arrived from Birmingham — overwhelmingly want the same things: to feel connected, to belong, to know their neighbours, to have somewhere to go on a Wednesday evening that is neither home nor work.
The challenge is structural, not personal. The third places that once made these connections effortless are under strain. Some have gone. Others are going. And the geography that makes Devon so beautiful — the hills, the valleys, the scattered villages connected by narrow lanes — makes replacing them harder than it would be in a city.
The value of these spaces is not in a programme or an intervention. It is in the simple, repeated act of being around other people — the informal support that accumulates when the same faces turn up in the same room week after week.
But the solution is not to wait for someone else to fix it. The communities that are thriving in rural Devon — the ones with active village halls, community pubs, regular social gatherings — are the ones where individuals decided to do something. They organised a share offer. They started a supper club. They opened the doors of the village hall on a Friday evening and put the kettle on.
The tradition of gathering together, of sharing food and finding connection, is one of the oldest human impulses. It does not require a purpose-built venue or a government grant. It requires people who care enough to create the conditions for it to happen.
If the third places are disappearing, build new ones. If the old forms do not work, invent new ones. If nobody has started something in your village, your street, your corner of Devon — perhaps that person is you.
The table is waiting.