A sofa was dumped in the middle of Lydbrook, a village in Gloucestershire, and every time Alex Elton-Wall walked past it he found himself smiling. While he’s clear he doesn’t condone fly-tipping, the cream-coloured two-seater looked “really funny,” he says, perched on a patch of waste ground, next to a road, the woods as a scenic backdrop. As an amateur photographer, he spotted an opportunity.
At the start of April, a few weeks after the sofa first appeared, the 49-year-old office worker posted a message in the village Facebook group asking for people to come and pose on the sofa so he could take their portraits. That day, he says, “I ended up taking pictures from 10 in the morning until eight o’clock that night. People were just having so much fun, and it was so bizarre what we were doing.”
Since then, Elton-Wall has staged more photoshoots and taken pictures of more than 170 locals with the sofa – and even a few animals, including a tortoise, a chicken and a horse. His photoshoots have made the sofa a surprise tourist attraction, rising up the Tripadvisor rankings to become thesecond-best thing to do in Lydbrook(pipped only by an alpaca farm). It even has its own dedicatedFacebook page, called Lydbrook Lounge, where visitors post their own pictures. “It’s become a real community and feelgood thing,” says Elton-Wall. “You know, life’s tough, the world’s pretty crazy at the moment, but people have really embraced this.”
Items started appearing mysteriously around the sofa; a side table with a plant pot, a hat stand, a lampshade, a rug, a coffee table and a magazine rack. Elton-Wall thinks this could be the work of a secret local artist, nicknamed Tumpsy, who was responsible for a spate of googly eyes that cropped up around the village a few years ago.
“I kept meaning to stop taking photos, but people kept asking me,” says Elton-Wall. He’s taken photos of the kids’ football team, staff from the local cafe serving afternoon tea, and the owner of the local timber yard posing with chainsaws – all with the sofa. “I’ve got pictures of everything from kids jumping up and down on the sofa to a couple of blokes drinking pints, who were kidnapped from the local pub.”
Elton-Wall, who has lived in Lydbrook for nearly 20 years, has decided to create a photo book, which he will sell at the village fete in the summer to raise money for playground equipment. “It was just this amazing opportunity to capture a snapshot in time of the community,” he says.
Yesterday, without warning, the project ended. The sofa, and all the items surrounding it, suddenly disappeared. Elton-Wall has no idea who took them and says he has mixed emotions. “At the end of the day, fly-tipping is not to be condoned. People in the village were always clear that it would be disposed of properly.” Looking at all the comments online, mourning the loss of the sofa, one stood out to him: “Don’t be sad it’s over, be glad it happened.”