COVID-19 grassroots memorial practices in the UK

Abstract

At the time of writing, confirmed UK deaths from COVID-19 number over 160,000. While the restrictions on burial rituals and closure of faith spaces during successive UK lockdowns have impacted the commemoration of COVID-19 victims, the emergence of grassroots memorial practices – from street art campaigns to yellow hearts in the windows of bereaved households – demonstrates the extent to which communities have adapted ceremonial processes in a period of national trauma. This visual essay examines a selection of grassroots activities, created both during and between UK lockdowns, charting the way in which apparently coherent aesthetic approaches to COVID-19 memorialisation provide cover for diverse political and personal agendas.

INTRODUCTION

For French historian Pierre Nora, memorials are designed to ‘to stop time, to block the work of forgetting, to establish a state of things, to immortalize death, to materialize the immaterial’ (1989, 19). In the Global North, these ‘sites of memory’ have taken on standardised forms: the headstone; the figurative monument; the memorial park; the photographic memento. While memorial design has become more participatory in the twenty-first century, the public are still often excluded from the creative process.¹ Memorials are designed for, but not by, the bereaved and, in the case of mass losses, are often seen to promote a homogenised collective narrative (Molyneux 1995, 18). However, in the United Kingdom, memorial responses to COVID-19 deaths have diverged from this tradition. Emerging initially in lockdown conditions, when public gatherings and formal remembrance activities were prohibited, these memorial practices have utilised grassroots methods to develop novel means of honouring the dead. By the summer of 2020, hearts, rainbows, and flowers had become the visual vernacular of COVID-19 remembrance in the UK. While rainbows were typically used to connote support for National Health Service workers, hearts, flowers, and the colour yellow became associated with loss and remembrance. These motifs – appropriated from contexts as varied as greeting cards, queer activism, and emoji culture – were not imposed upon communities as fitting symbols for COVID-19 losses but rather emerged from the limitations on public displays of grief. Window art, alongside some pavement drawings, suited lockdown conditions, enabling individuals to produce their own memorials. And, in the less restrictive periods between lockdowns, ‘sites of memory’ associated with COVID-19 became more collaborative and increasingly accessible, moving from the private home to public space.²

This visual language of grassroots COVID-19 memorials, whilst varied in its application, was dominated by specific attributes. Hearts, whether red or yellow, were a recurrent element, often coupled with text. Short positive messages were common, ranging from only one word, such as ‘hope’ (as seen in Figure 6), through to full sentences: ‘after the storm there’s always a rainbow’ (Figure 7). Typically, these were reassurances or declarations of support for key workers or the NHS (Figure 8). Artworks were near universally hand-rendered and, where formalised digital graphics were utilised, there was often a participatory element (as seen in Figure 4). Many were co-created, with fragmentary aesthetics comprised of multiple thematically linked contributions in close juxtaposition (Figures 1 and 2 and Figure 4). Rainbows were seen throughout and were more typically aligned to messages of support for the NHS than remembrance. The colour yellow was also very common (Figures 3–5) but, by contrast, was associated with loss, most widely seen in the graphic styling of the National Day of Reflection, held first on 23rd March 2021, which featured yellow flower motifs.

FIGURE 1. National Covid Memorial Wall, 2021, London [various]. Photography by Rob Tovey.

FIGURE 2. Barford Heart, 2020, children of Barford Saint Peter's Church of England VA Primary School. Photography by Rob Tovey.

FIGURE 3. Memorial outside the Greyhound Pub, 2021, Leamington Spa. Photography by Rob Tovey.

FIGURE 4. Heart of Art, 2021, Kelly Iles, Leamington Spa. Photography by Rob Tovey.

FIGURE 5. [untitled] Cross at Christ Church Brownsover, Rugby, 2021. Photography by Zoe Little.

FIGURE 6. [untitled] Memorial at St. George’s Church, Rugby, 2021. Photography by Zoe Little.

FIGURE 7. Stay Safe, 2021, May Belle Draws, Leamington Spa. Photography by Rob Tovey.

FIGURE 8. [Untitled] Mural at the rear of 129 Shrubland Street, Leamington Spa, 2021 [unknown artists]. Photography by Rob Tovey.

While UK-wide commemorative practices such as the National Day of Reflection often employed these popular visual motifs, this article focuses on the community-based iterations of the same aesthetics. Grassroots memorials are typically characterised as local, spontaneous, improvised and performative in their response to trauma (Margry and Sánchez-Carretero 2011). From flowers placed at the site of a fatal road accident to the Belfast murals dedicated to the victims of the Troubles, grassroots memorials appropriate public space and express grief whilst often also seeking justice. Thus, the memorial as a process of coming to terms with loss is often reconfigured as a method of protest (Hajek 2013). Whilst a radical political intent is evident in some of the works responding to the pandemic, such as the National Covid Memorial Wall – a 500-metre long mural in London co-created by campaign groups and the wider public (Figure 1) – the research presented here, focused on a sample of commemorative practices in Warwickshire, England, suggests a fragmented picture elsewhere in the UK. In these examples, coherent aesthetic and methodological approaches to memorialisation provide cover for diverse political and personal agendas, ranging from supporting community resilience and expressing trauma to promoting local businesses and challenging the legitimacy of lockdowns.

Produced in the early stages of the pandemic, while the UK was in its first lockdown (March – June, 2020), the Barford Heart (Figure 2) was created by children at Barford Primary School in response to the coronavirus crisis and in celebration of Lent. Presented as a lockdown activity, in a period during which schools were closed, children were asked to find and paint a stone with a positive message. The rocks were then arranged into a heart and displayed outside Barford Village Hall throughout April and May (Fox 2022). It is notable that, even at this early stage of the pandemic, many visual motifs that came to characterise grassroots memorial practices in the UK are evident in the Barford Heart, including rainbows, yellow, blue and red hearts and short hopeful messages. It is also noteworthy that there is an absence of religious or funerary iconography, despite the Christian framing of the work, perhaps suggesting that the priority was to support community resilience and togetherness, free from ideological division or the trauma of bereavement.

In the tradition of the ‘spontaneous shrine’ (Santino 2006, 5), this memorial in Leamington Spa (Figure 3) sees flowers tied to railings, alongside homemade dedications, and an England football shirt. Whilst the commemoration shares direct similarities with roadside memorials, it is made distinctive by its positioning, not street side, but on a pedestrian walkway next to The Greyhound pub garden. Yellow flowers are utilised, and commemorations are adorned with heart motifs. Unlike community-oriented COVID-19 memorials, such as the Barford Heart, which is future-focused and celebrates shared values, the emphasis here is on specific instances of bereavement and loss. Maria Tumarkin describes this form of remembrance as a ‘traumascape’; the bereaved, their assumptive understanding of the world shattered, create vernacular shrines as a means of mourning their dead and working through trauma (Tumarkin 2005; Collins and Opie 2010). The intimate language and specificity of imagery used frames this as a performative collection of tributes from friends and loved ones, located in a space of shared significance.

In February 2021, following the loss of her father, Kelly Iles created Heart of Art, a collaborative mural in the windows of a subsequently closed shop, Enchanted, in the Royal Priors Shopping Centre, Leamington Spa (BBC 2021). Yellow vinyl hearts affixed inside the windows show hand-written dedications in remembrance of those lost to the coronavirus in the local community. The memorial predates the painting of the National Covid Memorial Wall in London by four weeks and, whilst there is no evidence that one design informed the other, the similarities are clear, specifically the shared adoption of heart motifs, handwritten dedications, and the use of a participatory methodology. But there are also features which distinguish this memorial from the National Covid Memorial Wall and from other practices identified in this research: Heart of Art (Figure 4) is branded with a logo, it utilises professionally produced vinyl graphics, and is protected behind glass. These attributes orient the work away from street art and grassroots traditions in which spaces are typically co-opted without authorisation, and instead suggests coordinated and sanctioned action. While Heart of Art does function as a heterotopia – a space of layered meanings that refers to other times or places – it does so without the interjectory grammar of street art or the directness of the spontaneous shrine (Foucault 1998; Collins and Opie 2010).

For the UK’s National Day of Remembrance on 23 March 2021, marking the anniversary of the first national lockdown, Christ Church in Brownsover, Rugby, decorated an outdoor cross with yellow flower imagery, ribbons, and daffodils (Figure 5). The use of the Christian cross for COVID-19 remembrance has been uncommon in the UK outside of church contexts, in contrast to Brazil and the USA where white and blue crosses have been widely adopted in grassroots memorial practices (see Sullivan 2020 and Newey 2021 for examples). The cross at Christ Church Brownsover is regularly employed throughout the year and newly decorated to mark specific occasions. In this instance, the timing of the National Day of Remembrance enabled Christ Church to celebrate the onset of spring, using traditional symbols of the season such as daffodils, while also commemorating coronavirus victims via established visual imagery, such as the recurrent use of the colour yellow. The avoidance of funerary motifs, such as flower garlands or dedications, alongside the dual function of the cross as both a memorial and a prompt for seasonal optimism, is suggestive. It could point to a tonal shift within British society befitting the second year of a pandemic, a move from raw grief to acceptance. But it may also suggest that grassroots memorial practices, rather than taking an overtly political stance, are often pragmatic, and indeed optimistic, in their response to COVID-19.

A common motif within grassroots memorial practices in the UK and another example of future-oriented responses to COVID-19 losses has been the use of short positive messages that typically give thanks or speak to the future. Here, at St George’s Church in Rugby, packing crates have been adapted and painted, the typography declaring ‘hope’ in capital letters, with cut-out sections acting as shelves for small potted flowers (Figure 6). Created for the UK’s National Day of Remembrance, other activities saw the public collecting handmade hearts in memory of loved ones, taking flowers away with them, and adding hearts to memorials. This optimistic reimagining of accepted COVID-19 imagery contains an element of collective future thought (Szpunar and Szpunar 2015), in this case a societal desire to look forward with hope and, by doing so, to recalibrate a traumatic past.

The effects of multiple lockdowns on the British high street are visible in the palimpsestic window dressing to be found in most town centres. In Figure 7 we see three layers of competing graphic communication: the frontage of a now closed restaurant, Café Rouge on Regent Street, Leamington Spa, which includes vinyl graphics and signage; a window art mural created by May Belle Draws in response to the COVID-19 crisis, featuring rainbow motifs, optimistic messages of hope and revival, and images of local architecture; and finally, the most recent addition, an enquiries sign for the retail unit. The visual layering here speaks to shifting usage priorities, with the town centre as a contested site of COVID-19 messaging, and the inevitable ephemerality of many grassroots memorial practices.

Tensions between those broadly supportive of COVID-19 mandates – lockdowns, travel restrictions and vaccination passports – and those resistant to such constraints have also been visualised via street art (Ryan 2021). In Figure 8, a mural celebrating the NHS during the pandemic has been crossed out, or slashed, by another artist. The original tag has also been obscured and replaced with a new signature. In the largely unwritten ethics of graffiti art, acts of overwriting such as these are considered aggressive, a direct challenge to the original artist (Iljadica 2016). While it may be difficult to establish the cause of this particular conflict, the treatment here of a political slogan – one supportive of institutional efforts to combat COVID-19 – is suggestive of the schism that has emerged within public discourse in the UK.

Similarly, this interaction of street artists in Covent Garden Market, Leamington Spa, represents a public playing-out of COVID-19 tensions (Figure 9). The message ‘Covidania = Totalitarianism’ has been added to an existing image of a child engaged in graffiti, one of a series of ‘rude kids’ murals by street art collective Dotmasters which predate the pandemic. The phrase ‘war on childhood’ is elsewhere superimposed upon the image, confirming the anti-lockdown sentiment of the respondent, and explaining the targeting of this particular work. Childhood – its loss precipitated by COVID-19 restrictions and public health mandates – is the memorial object here. The adoption, by anti-lockdown and anti-vax groups, of street art reinforces the association of grassroots practices with protest movements.

FIGURE 9. [Untitled] Street Art, lane off Warwick Street, Leamington Spa, 2021, [unknown artists]. Photography by Rob Tovey.

While London’s National Covid Memorial Wall may survive as a lasting symbol of COVID-19 losses, examples of grassroots memorial practices from elsewhere in the UK are indicative of a diverse national picture, in which distinct, and often competing, agendas inhabit spontaneous, transient monuments to the coronavirus dead.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy under the COVID-19 Special Research : [grant no COV19\201422].

Notes on contributors

Rob Tovey

Dr Rob Tovey is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Graphic Design and Director of Studies for the School of Design and Creative Arts at Loughborough University. An experienced academic, Rob is a Senior Fellow of the HEA, Editor for Visual Communication: SAGE journals and a lead member of the Graphic Design Research Unit. His research focuses on real-world applications of graphic design that fall outside the traditional remit of the Graphic Designer, in contexts such as health, memorialisation and machine interfaces. He has worked on large funded research projects such as the Open Flight Deck project and Machine Vision in Everyday Life. Currently he leads the British Academy funded Covid-19 and Grassroots Memorials.

Lynsey McCulloch

Dr Lynsey McCulloch is a Research Fellow at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, leading a Paul Hamlyn Foundation-funded project on the impact of arts learning. Her research is interdisciplinary, encompassing literature, dance, pedagogy and visual studies. In 2019, she edited The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance (OUP). She is currently undertaking British Academy funded research into Covid-19 and grassroots memorials, having published previously on anti-memorial practices.

Notes

1 Recent examples of participatory public remembrance include the World War One centenary commissions; see McCulloch and Tovey 2019.

2 This visual essay draws evidence from the authors’ British Academy funded project, ‘We will remember them’: Covid-19 and Grassroots Memorial Practices, which has investigated these emergent remembrance activities across the UK.