About the 'Lest we Forget' project
This project concluded in October 2019
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.
Purpose of the project
The project explored the ways in which people interacted with 'Blood Swept Lands' and ‘Deepening Shadow’ through different media: from volunteering to 'planting' poppies, visiting the installation, sharing photographs on social media, and depositing home-made artefacts at the Tower; to attending a nightly roll-call ceremony, or buying a ceramic poppy.
‘Blood Swept Lands’ and ‘Deepening Shadow’ became media phenomena, and this project also investigated the importance of this engagement and critiqued the way the project was perceived as a 'success' by the public, the media, and Historic Royal Palaces.
Finally, ‘Lest We Forget’ placed the installation in the context of WWI commemorations from 2014-2018, by explaining the ways in which multiple public audiences commemorated WWI more widely, and whether attitudes changed over these four years of remembrance.
The research explored what constituted the 'success' of the Tower’s commemorative events and whether this success could be replicated in future projects and programmes.
Research questions
This project asked the following key research questions:
- Meaning & expression: In the context of war commemoration over the last century, how can a study of 'Blood Swept Lands' establish the ways in which the public made sense of the First World War centenary?
- Participation: How can a study of the 'Blood Swept Lands' project inform understandings of public engagement with commemorative art installations? What influence did this public engagement have on the understanding and interpretation of the installation?
- Legacy: What effect has the installation had on people’s perceptions and expectations of WWI commemoration, and can analysis of the 'Blood Swept Lands' installation enable others to predict future engagement with commemorative programmes in heritage sites and museums?
Media outputs
Journal Article
O'Keeffe, E., ‘Radical histories, emotional legacies, and everywhere in between? Exploring everyday responses to the traumas of war in Blood Swept Lands & Seas of Red (2014)’ in Mortality, 29 (2024), 306-29.
Blog posts
Podcast
First World War Poetry: From Robert Graves to Mary Borden, Historical Association Podcast. Eleanor O’Keeffe in conversation with Professor Paul O’Prey as part of the Teacher Fellowship Programme developed by the project.
Public talks
Eleanor O’Keeffe, ‘Lest We Forget’, Historic Royal Palaces Members’ Talk (2019).
Social media
Armistice Day mini campaign (2019). The project team worked with Historic Royal Palaces’ social media teams to develop and create Twitter content for public and schools audiences. The total reach of the campaign was 148,400 with an active engagement of 12,473.
Academic and professional outputs
Symposium
A symposium for museum practitioners and scholars was run by the project in September 2019 at the Tower of London.
One of the outputs of this event was a report with key recommendations on ‘(En)gauging audience data & research within museums and heritage’.
Professional Knowledge Exchange and Networks
Megan Gooch attended a workshop held as part of the Reflection of the Centenary project led by Lucy Noakes, to discuss the ways in which the Centenary programme commemorating the First World War had been evaluated.
In 2019 Megan Gooch also delivered a paper entitled ‘Voices of War & Peace: the Great War and its Legacy’, as part of an AHRC event ‘Communities, Commemoration, Collaboration: shaping our futures through sharing our pasts’ to review the work of the First World War Engagement Centres.
Education
The project team developed an Historical Association Teacher Fellowship Programme for secondary school teachers on ‘Conflict, Art and Remembrance’ in collaboration with Michael Riley from the UCL Institute for Education. This was delivered onsite and online between January and August 2019.
In 2018 Megan Gooch was part of an expert panel discussing the remembrance of the First World War for Queen Mary University of London history undergraduate students and history society members.
Conference and workshop papers
Megan Gooch, ‘Seas of Red: the Flood of Tower of London Poppies Images in 2014, Understanding the Uses and Impacts of Iconic Cultural Images in the Digital World’ Kings College London (2018).
Megan Gooch, ‘Heritage, art and commemoration: a centenary without history’, Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference, University College London (UCL) (2019).
Megan Gooch, ‘Intangible Poppies: Digital Remembrance at the Tower of London’, Memories of the Future, University of London (2019).
Megan Gooch, ‘Managing the Sacred Space: the Challenges of Popular Commemorative Practices for Cultural Institutions’, Annual Memory Studies Association Conference, Madrid (2019).
Megan Gooch, ‘Museum meanings - changing the commemoration conversation at the Tower of London or just reflecting it?’, ICOM General Conference, Kyoto (2019).
Megan Gooch, ‘Small Scale Audience Research = Big Insight’, Army Museums Ogilby Trust Conference, Scottish Regiment in London (2019).
Megan Gooch, ‘Small scale audience research = big insight: Understanding Your Visitors’, Museums + Heritage Show, Olympia, London (2019).
Eleanor O’Keeffe, 'Unvernunftig? How institutional memory shaped remembrance in the centenary in Beyond the Deepening Shadow: the Tower Remembers’, First World War Network Conference, Edinburgh Napier University (2019).
Eleanor O’Keeffe, ‘History Lite or History Plus? Remembrance, Teaching and Hyper Commemoration, Historical Association Annual Conference, Chester (2019).
Eleanor O’Keeffe, ‘Preserving and creating traditions at the Tower of London in 2014 and 2018’, ICOM General Conference (2019).
Eleanor O’Keeffe, ‘The Labour of Remembrance: Oral history and the stories of commemoration within Military Life’, Oral History Society Conference (2019).
Megan Gooch and Eleanor O’Keeffe, ‘The 'Emotional Habitus' of Commemoration in 21st-Century Britain: Remembering the First World War at the Tower of London, 2014-2018’, Social History Society Conference, University of Lincoln (2019).
Eleanor O’Keeffe, ‘A Truly National Commemoration? The Audiences and Anglospheres of 'Tower Poppies' (2014)’, Modern History Workshop, Institute of Historical Research (2021).
Eleanor O’Keeffe, ‘Cultural Technologies of Memorialisation’, Institute of Historical Research (2021).
Eleanor O’Keeffe, ‘Cultural Technologies of Memorialisation’, University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education (2021).
Research team
Principal Investigator: Dr Megan Gooch (HRP)
Postdoctoral Research Associate: Dr Eleanor O’Keeffe (HRP)
Advisory panel: Michael Day CVO, (formerly Chief Executive of Historic Royal Palaces), Polly Richards (Polly Richards Consulting), Dr Silke Arnold-de Simine (Birkbeck College, University of London), Dr Jenny Kidd (Cardiff University), and Dr Joanne Sayner (Newcastle University).
Funder
This project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Early Career Fellowship scheme.
