Tower Poppies to Stay or Go?

The poignancy of the poppies at the Tower of London has attracted around 4 million people to view the artwork. David Cameron amongst others, has joined  Boris Johnson’s plea to keep the poppies in place for longer than their final day of 12th November.

Should they stay or should they go?

It’s a difficult one, many more people than ever anticipated have visited – and it is a truly incredible sight. As a guide at the Tower it has been especially emotive to see, over the weeks, the red tide swell to fill the moat. But part of me thinks that their timely removal symbolises even more movingly the snuffing out of life – the young men who gave their lives –  plucked in their prime perhaps?  One way or another, many people have been affected by the Blood Swept Lands And Seas Of Red by ceramic artist Paul Cummins.

If you cannot get to the poppies in time but want to experience the feeling of desolation that comes from having seen the sheer scale of sacrifice then I suggest a trip to Brookwood Military Cemetery in Surrey, just 30 miles from London, the largest Commonwealth war cemetery in the UK, covering 37 acres.

Land was set aside in 1917 for the burial of men & women of the forces of the Commonwealth & Americans, who had died, many of battle wounds, in the London district. Brookwood is the only American Military Cemetery of World War I in the British Isles. The cemetery contains the graves of 468 American war dead and 1,601 Commonwealth burials of the First World War.

3,476 burials were added from the Second World War. There is a large Royal Air Forces section which also contains the graves of Czechoslovakian and American airmen who served with the RAF). A further plot contains approximately 2,400 Canadian graves.

The cemetery also contains French, Polish, Czechoslovakian, Belgian and Italian sections, and a number of war graves of other nationalities.