I’m almost at the end of my series of moments on The Bloomsbury Book Benches. And this one is one of the best, IMHO, the intricate and bold design being the work of Thomas Dowdeswell and representing George Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The bench is (or was - see below) located just outside Birkbeck College’s main building in Torrington Square, just a stone’s throw from Senate House, which provided the architectural inspiration for the location of the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue) that features in the book.

So far this is the only bench that I’ve seen that has suffered some vandalism. You can see in the photo above that the seat is dented at one end, which is a great shame. The good news though is that once I reported the problem to the Books About Town organisers on the morning that I spotted the damage (actually about 3 weeks ago), they very quickly arranged to remove the bench and repair it. The only downside of that is that if you come to Torrington Square today, all you’ll see is an empty plinth! Hopefully it won’t be too much longer before it’s back on display.

Here are front and back views of this great bench:

You can see some of the detail on Dowdeswell’s web site here.

And here is the location (although at the time of writing the bench is being repaired):