"The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow. " – Bill Gates.
13 Apr 2026, 19:47
"The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow." – Bill Gates
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The more you know 💡
This Click shows the “World’s First Internet Bench” in the Abbey Gardens at Bury St Edmunds, a park laid out in the 1830s on the ruins of a powerful medieval Benedictine abbey that once helped inspire Magna Carta and drew pilgrims from across England. The bench, also known as the “cyber seat,” was installed here on 6 August 2001 as a joint project between MSN.co.uk and St Edmundsbury Borough Council, offering four modem jacks so people could plug in laptops and get free dial‑up internet while sitting among the flowerbeds.
Back then it was treated as a small media sensation: the borough won out over other UK councils in a competition run by MSN, TV crews came to film locals emailing from the park, and the bench eventually gained a Guinness World Record as the oldest internet bench. With Wi‑Fi and smartphones, the connections were switched off years ago, but the plaque remains as a tongue‑in‑cheek time capsule, reminding visitors that in 2001 sitting on a bench and going online felt futuristic enough to be an attraction in its own right.
The Abbey Gardens around it layer in even older stories: Victorian planting schemes that still fill 64 island beds with tens of thousands of flowers each year, a 19th‑century sundial fountain used to set the town’s clocks to Greenwich Mean Time, and the modern Garden of Reflection where Bury holds an annual Holocaust memorial service. On event days like the Bury Festival or Abbey Garden fireworks, people still end up sitting along this same path, scrolling on phones instead of plugging in cables, while the bench quietly marks the moment when the idea of “internet in the park” first went from science fiction to slightly clunky reality.
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