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Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly series in which NPR’s international team shares moments from their lives and work around the world.
Six years ago in the spring, as COVID-19 cases grew in distant China, Britain was torn between sealing the country off and letting daily life continue its restless hum. For people who lived through it, those weeks — and the subsequent months — were a strange state of upheaval.
Today, that collective experience is etched into London’s landscape. Raised by ordinary citizens in 2021, the 1,640-foot-long National Covid Memorial Wall stretched along the bank of the River Thames, directly opposite the Parliament, as if holding vigil over the nation’s corridors of power.
On a recent visit, I took a walk along that mural, where more than a quarter million hand-drawn hearts represented all the lives lost to the coronavirus — and the pain of those left behind. “Dad, our hero. Loved and missed,” wrote Amanda and Andy. “Our best friend,” they added. “My much-loved mother, Sylvia Renton, 1926-2021,” read another heart.
Britain entered its first COVID lockdown on March 23, 2020. But what ensued also included a series of scandals that jolted a public still raw with grief and confusion: the prime minister’s “partygate,” the health secretary’s office affair caught on CCTV camera, and controversies over the procurement of personal protective equipment.
That is why this wall matters.
A long, unbroken line of hearts beating defiantly against forgetting. It is a memorial as well as a mirror. It honors the dead while reminding those in power across the river of the cost of their missteps.
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