From seaside promenades to village greens, benches are more than just places to sit. These humble seats have become landmarks for friendship, remembrance, reflection and community.
Like a well-brewed cup of tea or a neatly ordered queue, there’s something very British about a simple bench that quietly knits people together. It’s much more than just a place to sit.
It’s a pause between steps, a place to share a chat or to admire a stunning view, to remember and reflect or to be part of the world as it moves on by. In Britain, we love a bench, with estimates of how many there are ranging from 130,000 to a million dotted across our parks, seaside promenades, stations and streets. Paul Griffiths, from Thirsk in North Yorkshire, knows a good bench when he sits on one.
The retired factory worker started the account @MyFaveBench, which has 24,000 followers on X, and is author of My Favourite Yorkshire Bench. “The value of a bench is not so much what you are sitting on as what goes with it,” he says. “It may have an amazing view or a touching inscription.
“For someone, possibly many people, a particular bench will be a special place. For them, there will be a story behind it, a personal connection, and that’s what makes it stand out.”
Public seating became part of the fabric of everyday life in the 1800s as the Victorian boom in national parks created a need for benches. Then the railway age of the 19th century also led to an explosion of station platform benches. As steam trains made the coast easier to get to, benches also became a defining feature of British promenades.
Today, there is no clear figure on how many public benches exist, not least because they can be anywhere – on council-owned land, bowling greens, coastal paths, outside hospitals and even in supermarket car parks. Faz Kazmi, co-founder of Bench Near Me, an app that aims to map every bench in the country, has calculated there could be as many as a million.
“We compared the number of benches we found in two locations, Winchester and Lewes, with the available public data,” he says. “There’s a significant gap. If you scale that nationally, the total could be far higher than official figures suggest.”
The aim of the app is not just to count benches, but to record useful details, such as whether a bench has a backrest or armrests, offers shelter from the rain, faces a view or simply how many people it can seat, so that it can act as a public resource for people looking for a place to sit.
Practical and important though that is, benches also have an emotional pull for many. The unsung hero of the British landscape, they are “public, egalitarian and free”, as the 2017 Manifesto for the Good Bench put it. They allow people “to loosely belong within the flow of city life, to see and be seen”.
Paul Griffiths has visited and photographed thousands of benches, both in this country and around the world, but there is one bench that always draws him back, in Leyburn in the Yorkshire Dales. “The view is incredible,” he says. “It’s where, for 20 or 30 years, my wife and I and our three sons have marked good times and bad.”
Whether celebrating a birth or death, the bench is where they always raise a glass.
Yet benches are not without controversy. Questions over how they’re designed, where they’re placed and how many there are have sparked debate in some areas.
In March, Hartlepool in County Durham put a pause on any new memorial benches after an audit found 275 across the town. Other councils have halted or restricted applications in areas where benches are already in high numbers. It begs the question, have we reached peak bench?
Kazmi thinks that there is room for more seating around the country. “We believe everyone should be within a 10 or 15-minute walk of a bench and we are not there yet,” he explains. “There will always be a demand for memorial benches and as more housing developments are built, benches will be part of that.”
Despite Hartlepool’s stance, benches are flourishing in other parts of the country.
Manchester City Council’s Age Friendly Neighbourhoods Strategy includes plans to install benches across the city, with a “bench route” linking places like shops, parks, doctors’ surgeries, bus stops and places of workshop in each of the city’s 32 wards. With 150 already installed, the aim is to make journeys easier and help people remain active, independent and connected for longer.
It’s hoped the shared seating will combat loneliness too, which is also the aim of Happy to Chat benches across the country, a movement that has its roots in Cardiff in 2019 when Allison Owen-Jones noticed an older man sitting alone in a park and wondered whether he wanted company.
She created a simple sign reading, “Happy to Chat Bench. Sit here if you don’t mind someone stopping to say hello!”, which she attached to public benches in the Welsh capital. The idea quickly spread across the UK and the world, with other groups creating their own versions.
Age UK Norwich has installed two of these, the latest in the grounds of Norwich Cathedral last year, inviting passers-by to sit down if they’re open to a friendly conversation.
This year, the British Heart Foundation has installed 65 striking red benches nationwide to mark its 65th anniversary. Each one honours a survivor of cardiovascular disease. In Scotland, 100 Breathing Space benches have been installed on station platforms, fitted with information on accessing mental health support. These initiatives – and others like them – reflect the view that benches are as important today as they’ve ever been.
They have quietly become knitted into the fabric of British life – a place to sit, but also a place to stop. And don’t we need that more than ever?
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