How bereaved campaigners, with a little help from the activists Led By Donkeys, created a powerful tribute to UK pandemic victims
On the morning of the day of the Euro 2020 final, Westminster Bridge is already bustling with football fans and England flags, but down by the riverside hush prevails. On the Albert Embankment, there is a wall, about a third of a mile long and shaded by plane trees, which runs alongside St Thomas’ hospital and looks out over the Thames at the palace of Westminster. Before 29 March this year, it was just a wall; now it is decorated with more than 150,000 red hearts, each one representing a life lost to Covid-19. Even the Sunday runners look a little sheepish about jogging past a memorial to the UK’s largest peacetime mass trauma event in more than a century.
As I walk along what is in effect the national Covid memorial, past occasional photographs, wilting bouquets and painted stones, I read shattering stories told in just a few words. There’s one dedication to a husband and wife who died nine hours apart and another that must have been written by a NHS worker: “TO ALL THOSE I COULD NOT SIT WITH… I’M SORRY.” Sometimes, hearts are tied together by pen like a bunch of balloons, to encompass messages from entire families. Certain phrases recur, like mantras of remembrance. In loving memory. We will always remember you. Gone but not forgotten.
