Lest We Forget: Poppies and Public Commemoration

Lest We Forget: Poppies and Public Commemoration

At the centenary of 2014, 'Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red' became the surprising star of commemorative activity. This collaborative art installation between artist Paul Cummins, designer Tom Piper, and Historic Royal Palaces comprised 888,246 ceramic poppies, planted in undulating waves in the Tower of London moat. In 2018, the Tower again became the focus of national commemoration with its sound and light installation ‘Beyond the Deepening Shadow’ with designer Tom Piper and sound artist Mira Calix. The popularity of these two installations showed that far from declining, First World War (WWI) commemoration was still intensely popular with the British public. 'Lest we Forget' was an innovative project which looked beyond the spectacle of ‘Blood Swept Lands’ by utilising the installations as case studies through which some of the wider issues of WWI commemoration could be understood.
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    Item type:Journal article,
    Radical histories, emotional legacies, and everywhere in between? Exploring everyday responses to the traumas of war in Blood Swept Lands & Seas of Red
    (2024-04-01)
    O’Keeffe, Eleanor
    War commemoration in the UK has become spectacular, performative, and mediatised, manifesting new scales of visual power. This article assesses this ‘visual turn’ via an analysis of Blood Swept Lands & Seas of Red (BSL&SR) – an installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies, each representing a British and Colonial service fatality of the First World War, ‘planted’ in the Tower of London’s moat to mark the First World War Centenary (FWWC). Celebrated as a major success by FWWC officials, and attracting extraordinary public acclaim, academic analyses found that BSL&SR encouraged ‘unthinking’ re-circulation of ‘tropes’ about the war, which inhibited pluralism and critical consideration of the UK’s history of armed intervention. This article traces and explores the range, diversity, and nuances of ‘everyday’ public responses to the installation, drawing on a wealth of new information accessed through embedded research within Historic Royal Palaces (HRP). In doing so, it prompts reflection and debate about future state-supported cultural programmes and the role of heritage therein.