Artist Trevor Pitt is evoking childhood memories with a project that engages close-knit communities, writes Lorne Jackson.

Most people would agree that park benches aren’t the most inspiring objects in the world.

As examples of furniture go, they fall far short of the kind of seating arrangement Prince William and his fiancé can look forward to lounging upon, one fine day.

The possibility of a humble bench being mistaken for a gold-encrusted throne is as likely as a tramp being confused with a toff.

What is a bench, after all?

A ladder that likes to loaf. A few planks of wood screwed together, then mottled with moss, massacred by woodworm and peppered with pigeon poop. Though that isn’t how Birmingham artist Trevor Pitt views things.

He has turned the humble bench into a thing of rare beauty.

In the last few years he has invested his craft and creativity into transforming a series of benches.

The finished works are very much like the typical seats you can spot in any local park across the Midlands – with one major difference.

Pitt’s benches are covered in knitwear, which explains why he calls them ‘soft benches’.

He has been making these wool-warped works of weirdness and wonder since 2005. His latest, which is called The Black Country Bench, was made with the help of a local group of Black Country knitters.

The wool they used was an important part of the art work, as it was spun from an ancient breed of sheep, then dyed with steel wool, to give it a gritty, industrial look.

It’s now on show at The Public Gallery in West Bromwich, and Pitt sees it as the latest variation of an idea that began when he started to look back into his own past.

The first soft bench he made was for the Glebe Farm housing estate in Birmingham, where he was brought up.

At the time he wanted to make a political point about the difficulties faced by the local community. “My mum had recently been knocked down by a drunk,” he recalls. “And my auntie had been robbed of £10 bingo money.

“Yet the council estate where I was raised, and where my family were still living, had originally been constructed as some sort of ideal village. My family had moved out of the slums to live there, and they saw it as some sort of utopia.

“When I was a kid, there were rose gardens and benches in the shopping area, and people could sit and have a chat.

“Then, 15 years ago, the benches were cleared from Glebe Farm, in order to build a car park for a shopping centre.

“At the same time, the ravages of Thatcherism were really hitting home. The white working-class estates like the one where I was brought up were being decimated by people not having any work.

“Petty crime set in, along with drug taking and vandalism.”

The estate may have been crumbling into a state of disrepair, but Pitt managed to dodge the destruction.

He left for university and a voyage of personal discovery, finally settling on a career as an artist.