London’s iconic bridges will soon have their very own poet according to a “one of its kind” job advert.
The City Bridge Foundation, which maintains the Tower, London, Southwark, Millennium and Blackfriars crossings, is hiring a “bard with a bent for bridges”.
The lucky candidate, responsible for celebrating the bridges’ history through verse, will be paid £10,000 for sixteen days’ work – equivalent to roughly £3,125 for a five-day week.
Giles Shilson, City Bridge Foundation chairman, said: “The job is, as far as we know, the only one of its kind anywhere and is a way of celebrating our bridges and our funding work, while supporting and promoting poetry as a modern, vibrant, culturally relevant art form.”
The poet-in-residence scheme, launched on World Poetry Day (March 21), will see the successful applicant regularly visit London’s famous bridges to draw inspiration for their work.
The role is open to published poets of any style who either live in London or can regularly travel to the capital to central London and visit some of the charities funded by City Bridge Foundation.
The charity, which awards over £30 million a year to projects across London, said the new role is of no cost to the taxpayer.
The winner will likely draw inspiration from past portrayals of the iconic crossings, including the world-famous nursery rhyme London Bridge is Falling Down.
Dating back to the 17th century, the song deals with the dilapidation of the original medieval stone bridge.
The Victorian London Bridge opened in 1831 appears in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, regarded as one of the most important English language poems of the 20th century.
Eliot compares City commuters crossing the bridge to the condemned souls in Dante’s Inferno – a feeling many commuters may recognise.
More information about the role and details of how to apply can be found at www.citybridgefoundation.org.uk/poetry or https://poetrysociety.org.uk/projects/city-bridge-poet-in-residence