Cast Iron Camel-ended Bench, Victoria Embankment, London

Camel-ended Bench

Berry & Son, Regent Street

SLB Foundry, Sittingbourne

1877

Cast iron

Victoria Embankment, London

Photograph and text by Jacqueline Banerjee

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"With their battered walls, thick parapets, occasional landing stages, all faced with granite blocks, with their rhythmical rows of plane trees lining broad avenues, their dolphin-based lamps of cast iron, their lion-headed mooring rings, and general character of solid indestructibility, the Embankments are the most enduring monuments of Victorian enterprise London can offer" (Weinreb and Hibbert 267). Most of the benches, much used by office-workers at lunchtime, tourists during the day, and down-and-outs at night, feature sphinxes, presumably to go with Cleopatra's Needle, installed on the Embankment in 1878. The fine "laden camel" bench-ends, one of which is shown here, seem to have been a part of this scheme.

An observant reader, William Arthurs, has kindly pointed out that one such bench is the subject of the frontispiece (image) to Jack London's The People of the Abyss (1903).

These benches nicely complement the Imperial Camel Corps Memorial in the Embankment Gardens, which was unveiled later, in 1916.

References

Weinreb, Ben and Christopher Hibbert. The London Encyclopaedia. London: Macmillan, rev. ed. 1992.

Last modified 29 August 2007