Blood-Swept Lands and Seas of Red - The Poppy De-Installation

This morning Bradley and I joined a team of volunteers to help de-install a small part of the 888,246 ceramic poppies planted for the Blood-Swept Lands and Seas of Red at the Tower of London. The installation has been slowly growing since the Summer due to various volunteers helping to plant the poppies until the final poppy was placed on Remembered Day on the 11th November. Every poppy planted represents a British fatality during the First World War.

We applied to be volunteers through the Tower of London website at the end of October, but were originally told we had missed out due to the volume of people who had applied. A week later we were excited to receive an email saying that due to several cancellations, we would be able to volunteer after all!

We arrived at the Tower of London just before 9.00 a.m. dressed in our best outdoor clothes - warm jackets, woollen jumpers and waterproof boots. The Poppy Team sent us an email last night saying that due to the rainfall over the last week, the moat around the tower was starting to resemble Glastonbury with the sheer amount of mud, and pools of water everywhere.

The forecast was for clear skies, but of course as soon as we arrived the heavens opened and it rained for the first hour we were there. We were sorted into groups upon arrival, and led into the moat to begin removing poppies. We were given gardening gloves to wear, which were soon soaking wet and absolutely freezing, making it almost impossible to use our hands to do anything useful.

The first part of removing the poppies involved yanking them out of the ground, and sliding off the washers holding the flower in place. The washers, posts and flowers then went into several different buckets and wheelbarrows ready to be sorted by the other teams. Halfway through we swapped duties, though by far the best duty was the flower removal! Removing the top washers from each post was much harder than it appeared, and trying to use zip-ties to tie the posts together was almost impossible with my too big gloves on.

I don't look too muddy here, but it got much worse as the morning went on!

All the volunteers were really positive and excited to be there, it's not everyday you're able to go right down into the Tower of London and there were lots of opportunities for photos.

There are three shifts each day, with each shift lasting between 2-3 hours. after about 2 1/2 hours we were told we were all done for the day and we could stop what we were doing for the next shift to take it up. Our shift managed to remove 8,000 poppies, so it was a great achievement. The time went super quickly as well, especially the poppy removal in the beginning.

We took a lot of photos of ourselves on the way out, a bit hard since we were completely covered in mud. Luckily there are bathrooms right next to the Tower, so we popped in and washed as much off as we could before heading to GBK Burgers for lunch. We must have been successful since we didn't get too many weird looks!

So despite the rain and cold, we had a great time. It was awesome to be a part of such an amazing installation, especially at the Tower of London, one of our favourite places in London.

I did learn two things though - the first is that I am not at all cut out for manual labour. I am so sore and I haven't been able to get the dirt out from under my fingernails despite repeated hand-washings today. The second is that I'm glad we were the first group, everyone after us had to wear the same gloves as we had on, I can't imagine how horrible it must feel to put on sopping wet and cold gloves at 3.00 p.m. in the afternoon!