Opening Doors

This blog is not about networking or creating opportunities. It is about opening doors! One of the inscrutable things about living in England for Americans is that almost all doors open inwards. In the States, doors on public and commercial buildings open outwards by law, so that in case of fire, people don’t pile up behind those trying to get the door open.

If you see Americans struggling to get a door open in England, one of two things might be wrong. After years of training to pull open a door, one has to remember to push instead. But second, not all doors are unlocked. This is extremely confusing, especially since often only one door of two is unlocked but you can never tell which one. Why can’t there be some system to either have the left door open (drive on the left?) or the right door open (walk against traffic?). But these analogies are useless, actually; when you try to walk down a crowded street, there is no consensus whether to walk on the left or on the right. Anyway, going in a double door, if the left one is open, coming out it will be the right one. Why not just open both doors? Is it really that hard to unlock two doors rather than just one?

Of course, houses are different, and most front doors to houses open inwards even in the States. But what about interior doors? In every house/flat we have lived in in England, we have had to either take the doors off or rehang them on the other side – because frustratingly, the doors open into the centre (center) of the room (or even worse, directly across a hallway) rather than against the wall, where they would not be in the way. So we end up having rehung doors opening against the lightswitch. If anyone knows a good reason why English doors open into the centre of a room, I would be really interested in hearing it.

The outward-opening door of an American public building. The solution to the problem is on the left side: double-opening sliding doors that open neither inwards nor outwards.