A Place of Both Solitude and Belonging: In Praise of the Park Bench

“We spend our life,” said Samuel Beckett, “trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench.” There’s something hugely attractive about the mere idea of a free bench. It suggests pleasant idling, the enjoyable whiling away of a few minutes. Perhaps that freedom is accentuated by the bench’s own immovability, the nature of it being fixed to the ground. It is something about the contrast between our own usual motion and accommodating to a fixed point.

In England people tend to be quietly disappointed if someone sits beside them on a bench, it spoils their solitary moment (being English, of course, they would never in any way express this disappointment). In Mediterranean countries, on the other hand, benches are social spaces, places where the elderly sit and talk and watch the rhythm of urban life. The bench can address a paradox, that of deliberate isolation in a crowd as well as enabling a presence in the public arena, becoming part of the life of the street.

The bench is the most archetypal item of furniture, street or otherwise. Before there were chairs or even tables, there were benches. The very name flows through our language: a judge sits at the bench, quality is benchmarked, the word “bank” derives from the benches (banca) once used to trade from, Parliament has its front, back and cross benchers, while football subs might come off the bench. But the bench we’re concerned with here is a very particular type—the public bench.

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