The government has yet to give the wall official status, though Prime Minister Boris Johnson told bereaved families, including Hall herself, recently that it is a “good candidate” to be a permanent memorial. Incredibly it took less than two weeks for the army of volunteers to paint the 150,000 or so hearts. The memorial was established in March by the COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice and campaign group Led by Donkeys as a visual representation of the scale of loss in the U.K. “As you walk along you'll see thousands and thousands of names, so the hearts have been personalized. “We're getting red back onto the wall, to keep it vibrant,” said Hall. Hall makes the weekly trek along with several others to ensure the hearts don't fade to pink from luscious red and add inscriptions from those bereaved who can't make the journey to the wall. “For me I think it has absolutely fulfilled the original intention which was to remind people of the scale of our loss,” said Fran Hall, a spokesperson for the COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice who lost her husband of three weeks, Steve Mead, in September 2020, a day before his 66th birthday. There's also the odd cake and a cup of coffee.įor the volunteers, it's a bit like art therapy - meditative. The National COVID Memorial Wall on a half-kilometer stretch of the Albert Embankment is dedicated to those who died, with each life lost represented by a carefully painted heart that volunteers freshen up on a weekly basis with long-lasting masonry paints. The actual number is believed to be higher - around 160,000 - as there was very little testing done in the early days of the pandemic in the U.K. As the global death toll nears the threshold of 5 million dead, Britain officially has recorded around 140,000 coronavirus-related deaths, Europe's second highest toll after Russia.
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