2 hours ago
7
When Hartlepool council announced last week that it wouldn’t be accepting any new applications for memorial benches as it had too many already, it joined a growing list of towns and parks that are increasingly unable to cope with the demand. In an era when social media memorial pages are commonplace and potentially infinite, what is driving this desire to commemorate a loved one in a physical space?
The popularity of memorial benches certainly gives the lie to the assumption that we live in a post-material world. It also signals a change in the way that we grieve. Memorial benches speak of a need to mourn not just behind closed doors but also in public – a shift to which digital culture has probably contributed, and which manifests particularly strongly in secular countries where mourning isn’t mediated through the church.
What’s especially interesting is the way that the benches frame death. In contrast to the cemetery – a place cordoned off from the living, where remains are interred and which exists solely to mark the end of a life – the memorial bench evokes the vitality of the body and a person’s physical existence. Placed in a park, square or seafront, it returns the memory of them to the hurly-burly of daily life. Friends and relatives gather on the benches on the anniversary of a loved one’s death to celebrate their life and toast their memory. Unlike other forms of public memorial, such as a plaque or a tree, it’s a way-station for the living.
Benches are spaces where contact between passing strangers can take place; where someone can sit silently alone or read a book, usually without incurring disapproval or shame; where we can be alone together. They’re a free public space where no action or consumption is required. Benches are sites of new lives and experiences: where we eat, meet, phone, argue, cry and laugh, but also where we can slow down, rest weary legs and drop heavy loads and watch the world. Our backs abrade the inscription over time and superimpose our own bodies, like a palimpsest, on to that of the dedicatee.
Memorial benches celebrate lives that often look unremarkable from the outside, summoning up their specialness through a telling inscription; implicitly, they suggest that everyone’s story matters. They’re micro-narratives, whose silences – sometimes just a name and a date – can speak. They make us do the maths: how long was this life? Sometimes, they shock us with its brevity.
Because the inscription is written by the bench sponsor, they often tell a story about the relationship between sponsor and dedicatee. I particularly like one outside St Paul’s church in Covent Garden, London: “Christopher Hackett, actor 1963–2010. To the world he was just one, to us he was the world.” This takes Hackett outside the discourse of fame and celebrity – especially defining for an actor – and places him squarely in the domain of intimate relationships.
In my research on memorial benches over the years, I’ve noticed their increasing appearance as playful street art. My favourite: “This bench is dedicated to the men who lost the will to live while following their partners around the shoe shops of Chester.”
Most memorial benches are site-specific, celebrating both a person and a place meaningful to them. They’re not only in public space but also about it: a reminder (“She loved this park”) of the ways in which public spaces are stitched into our daily routines, and of the quiet value, meaning and conviviality attached to local squares and parks, which are increasingly encroached on by that grotesque, nonsensical phenomenon, the “privately owned public space”.
On the seafront in Seaford, East Sussex, a relative of mine and her children, aged 10 and 12, came upon a memorial bench dedicated to: “Glad and Ron Wellden. Now dancing together, always in the hearts of those who love you.” Her children spontaneously started to dance around it, when a woman in her 60s walked by and exclaimed with delight. The bench was dedicated to her parents, who met at a dance during the war and continued to dance together throughout their lives. Now, a new generation was dancing around it.
-
Anne Karpf is a professor of life writing and culture at London Metropolitan University. Her research on memorial benches will be published in a special issue of the journal Life Writing next month
