Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red

The site before you, the dry moat surrounding the Tower of London, was transformed in 2014 into a landscape of remembrance known as Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red. This installation featured 888,246 individual ceramic poppies, with each one representing a single British or colonial life lost during the First World War. The project began with the discovery of a poem in the unsigned will of an unknown soldier from Derbyshire. The artist Paul Cummins found this document in local records and was struck by the opening line, which provided the name for the entire work.