The Sunday dozen

John Wyver writes: My header image is of a somewhat-worse-for-wear concrete bench on London’s South Bank. Attached is a precious souvenir of the 2002 launch of BBC Four — nearly a quarter of a century ago! I feature it here as a complement to the first item in today’s list of articles and more that I have found engaging and enriching over the past week. • The disappearance of the public bench: although this excellent Gabrielle Bruney essay for Places journal is focussed on US examples, the arguments she makes are absolutely applicable this side of the pond too: Benches, like other public amenities, are places where optimistic visions of civic life meet messier realities. They’re sites of leisure and contestation that invite a range of constituencies with vastly differing needs and desires… To remove benches, or to curate who gets to sit, is to abandon the work of defining a civic ideal and determining, together, how to live up to it. When seating disappears, our relationship with…