Poppies:Wave on Barge Pier, Shoeburyness, Southend-on-Sea, Essex

© Ben Rector/Alam

A wave of remembrance. Armistice Day

On Armistice Day, also known as Remembrance Day, we’re on the Barge Pier in Shoeburyness, Essex – a former garrison town with a long military history. Our homepage features The Wave, a sweeping sculpture of ceramic poppies that appeared here in 2017. It was part of the temporary art installation Blood Swept Lands and Seas Of Red which filled the moat at the Tower WWI of London in 2014. The whole installation, by artist Paul Cummins and designer Tom Piper, was made up of 888,246 ceramic poppies representing all British and Commonwealth fatalities. Two parts, The Wave and Weeping Window, toured various sites across UK between 2015 and 2018.

Shoeburyness’s Barge Pier was built around 1908/9 to serve the garrison town situated on the Thames Estuary. Shoeburyness has been strategically important since the Iron Age, the Romans, Saxons and Danes all used this area as a military base. But it also played a crucial role in national military history, as a key site in the development and testing of weapons, and artillery training, from the mid-19th to mid-20th century.

The garrison was disbanded in the 1970s and the site is now protected, with many of its buildings listed. The pier on which The Wave sculpture stood is structurally unsafe and is fenced off – but more than 90,000 visitors were able to get a good view of the sculpture from the sea wall during its ten weeks here, a reminder of those who lost their lives in the Great War.