10,000 poppies overflowing in Salford museum
The sculpture will be open to the public from 10th November
Last updated 11th Nov 2021
A huge poppy sculpture has arrived in Salford to mark upcoming Remembrance Sunday as part of a dramatic new artwork, titled Poppies.
The 30 metre installation made up of over 10,000 ceramic poppies cascading down the inside of the Imperial War Museum has found its permeant home on the Imperial War Museum (IWM) North’s Air Shard.
The poppy is a symbol of those who lost their lives during World War One, representing the human cost of the war.
Sculpture artists Paul Cummins MBE said:
"They represent, to myself, represent the people who never found a home. The unknown soldiers, the fallen ones. Because the Imperial War Museum is the final resting place for a lot of memorabilia in war, this felt like a fitting site for it.
"It's become its final resting place. Its become a somewhere where people might be able to spend a moment just thinking about something without knowing what it meant and realising later what it means to them."
Reimagining of centenary remembrance
Poppies is a reimagining of the sculptures used in Cummins' 2018's Poppies: Wave and Weeping Window project, which toured to mark the end of the First World War centenary.
Poppies: Wave and Weeping Widow was a part of Paul Cummins' and designer Tom Piper Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red installation.
The installation was originally at HM Tower of London from August to November 2014 where 888,246 poppies were displayed, one for every British or Colonial life lost at the Front during the First World War.
Poppies: Wave and Weeping Window travelled to 19 locations around the UK between 2014 and 2018, with Wave concluding at IWM North and Weeping Window concluding at IWM London.
"Another cultural significance in the North"
With Poppies making its permanent home in the IWM North, Cummins said:
"I think it's nice to have something outside London, and because this is an iconic building in Salford and Manchester it makes sense. It's another map we have, and another cultural significance we have have in the North.
"Because it's such an unusually shaped building, and the colour and texture of the place, we have to make it a fitting site. It just kept growing and growing and growing, but it's taken a very long time to install it as well because it's welded to the floor."
The instillation opens the day before Remembrance Day, and will be a point of focus this Remembrance Sunday.
Poppies were a familiar sight on the battlefields of the Western Front, where they flourished in the devastated landscape.
Since John McCrae’s 1915 poem In Flanders Fields, which concluded with the lines ‘We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields,’ the poppy has endured as a symbol of remembrance.
Poppies:
World War 1 timeline:
28 June 1914: Archduke Francis Ferdinand is assassinated. Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia, beginning World War I
2-7 August 1914: British forces arrive in France
6-12 September 1914: The First Battle of the Marne. 13,000 British casualties with 1,700 dead. 67,700 Germans dead
5 November 1914: Britain and France declare war on the Ottoman Empire
17 July 1915: Women demonstrate the right to work in war industries
1 July 1916 - 18 November 1916: Battle of the Somme. 420,00 British casualties. 1,499,000 casualties overall.
6 April 1917: The United States declares war on Germany
20 November 1917: First large-scale use of tanks in combat at Cambrai, France
11 November 1918: Germany signs the Armistice at Compiègne, ending World War I.