He rated 300 benches. He married Sophie on the perfect one.

Sam Wilmot has rated more than 300 benches since 2019, scoring them on back support, building material, and the view, and in seven years he never once awarded a perfect 10. His highest mark, a 9, went to a bench outside the 13th-century St. John the Baptist Church in Old Sodbury, South Gloucestershire, with a wooden seat and a view stretching toward Bristol and Wales. Close, he decided, but not quite the overwhelming joy a 10 required. Then on June 21, 2026, that same bench earned it. Wilmot married his fiancee, Sophie, on it. Their first-ever conversation, fittingly, had been bench-related, when she told him he was doing a "cracking" job. He credits her with the page existing at all. "No moment or bench will ever come close to this for me," the 29-year-old wrote. "I can proudly say I have found my 10. In Sophie, and this bench." The bench's installers left a comment. They put it there in memory of a father who, they wrote, would have been amused and delighted.