Marked as London’s biggest draw this year, the poppy field memorial at the London Tower may have become just a bit too popular for its own good.
This weekend the public has been urged not to visit the installation that has drawn tens of thousands of visitors during the week-long half-term break, because of the milling crowds and long queues. London Underground was forced to temporarily close the nearest tube station of Tower Hill because of overcrowding.
Entitled “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red,” the installation of ceramic poppies planted on the dry bed of the moat that encircles the Tower commemorates those who died in World War 1, and is the creation of ceramic artist Paul Cummins. By Armistice Day on November 11, 888,246 ceramic poppies would have been planted — one for every British soldier (including those from Britain’s colonies) who died in the conflict.
From a trickle of flowers in July when the installation opened to a river of red by November — the arresting display has been planted by volunteers from all over the world. It has become a must-see for a city that is marking the 100th of events.
Each poppy is being sold for £25 and a share of the proceeds will fund six service charities.
The remembrance poppy – inspired by the poem In Flanders Fields by the war poet John McRae — is worn prominently on coat lapels in the United Kingdom in the weeks leading up to Remembrance Sunday, the second Sunday in November which is seen as the closest to Armistice Day.
The innocuous symbol has not been uncontroversial. It is rejected by anti-war groups who would rather hark back to the humanist and anti-war verses penned by other war poets like Wilfred Owens and Siegfried Sassoon, for whom the war was nothing but a senseless tumult of violence that obliterated an entire generation of young European men.
A recent commentary on the memorial in The Guardian met with an unfriendly backlash. The author wrote that the memorial had a “fake nobility to it.”
