Worldbuilding
The real map of a fictional town is usually built in the places people actually use.
Not the town hall. Not the heritage plaque. The café with the sticky tables, the car park by the chemist, the bench outside the post office, the pub everyone pretends not to know about. Those are the spots that tell you how a place works. Who meets where, who avoids who, who has time to linger.
That’s the useful worldbuilding. The official landmarks matter less than the unofficial ones people have chosen for themselves.
Not the town hall. Not the heritage plaque. The café with the sticky tables, the car park by the chemist, the bench outside the post office, the pub everyone pretends not to know about. Those are the spots that tell you how a place works. Who meets where, who avoids who, who has time to linger.
That’s the useful worldbuilding. The official landmarks matter less than the unofficial ones people have chosen for themselves.
The unofficial places are often where the plot lives, but the official ones still do some work. A town hall, a church hall, the library, they tell you what a place thinks it is allowed to be. The interesting bit is when the actual social geography ignores all that and settles elsewhere. That gap is usually more revealing than either version on its own.