This past summer, several famous British books were scattered across London, in the shape of benches. The “Books about Town” benches were grouped in different trails, to make it easy to walk past all of them on a few walks, and still I didn’t manage to catch more than one bench in the wild before all of the benches were removed and prepared to be auctioned off.
Thankfully, the University of London kindly arranged to have all of the benches displayed for one last weekend, all together in Gordon Square Garden. Finally a chance to see them all!
I photographed the Paddington bench and the Neverwhere bench, and fifteen others, including some of books I didn’t know, but I managed to forget to take a snap of the one science book in the collection: Darwin’s On The Origin of Species. Here’s the official photo from the site instead:
Today, this bench, and all the others, will be auctioned off. Having seen similar projects in other cities, I suspect that some of the benches will be bought by organisations that will display them to the public again. I hope the Darwin bench gets a good home, so that you can visit it – wherever it will be next.
The Finch and Pea 