Memorial benches seem an uncontroversial idea. A grieving family gets somewhere to remember their loved one; the rest of us get somewhere to sit down, and perhaps a witty or moving inscription to ponder. But Charles Alluto, chief executive of the National Trust for Jersey, has said they are having “an adverse impact on an area of natural beauty” and likened sitting on some of them to “standing on someone’s grave”.
Alluto said the benches, installed on the island’s headlands, “are put in places where people enjoyed that natural beauty, but you’re undermining the place they actually enjoyed. It is absolutely crucial that they do not become graveyards.” The anti-bench sentiment is not new. In 2002, Pembrokeshire Coast national park said memorial benches had made the area “sombre”.
George Julian, who set up a website and Twitter feed to celebrate memorial benches, says: “I don’t tend to see them in rural places, so I’m not convinced they’re turning nature into a graveyard – or that there would be anything wrong with that actually. I don’t see the harm in them.” She has always liked memorial benches. “I grew up in Torquay and it’s full of them. I like imagining who those people were, looking at the plaques, which are usually quite interesting or inspirational. They’re practical as well. Lots of people can’t walk long distances.”
Caroline Irwin’s family dedicated a bench to her father 18 years ago at Kingsbury water park, a country park in Warwickshire. She says she can see Alluto’s point about the benches in Jersey. “All those benches in a row are a bit over the top, but at places such as Kingsbury water park, they tend to be scattered around.”
Her father’s bench is in a beautiful spot – one of his favourites – overlooking a lake. Her mother is now too elderly to get to it, but she used to enjoy visiting it. “She and dad used to go walking around the water park a lot,” says Irwin. She visits it every year. “It’s that long ago that the raw grief has gone and now it just brings back happy memories.” Irwin says she likes to read the inscriptions on other memorial benches, “and think about the person even though I don’t know them, so I like to think that people do that with my dad’s bench”.
