Camel-ended Bench

Berry & Son, Regent Street

SLB Foundry, Sittingbourne

1877

Cast iron

Victoria Embankment, London

Photograph and text by Jacqueline Banerjee

[This image may be used without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose.]

"With their battered walls, thick parapets, occasional landing stages, all faced with granite block, 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 enterprize 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 camels at the end of the Embankment may be a part of this scheme, or perhaps later additions intended to echo 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.

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Last modified 29 August 2007