There’s a wall in London that is worth a visit. The wall stretches for half a kilometre alongside the River Thames, directly opposite the Houses of Parliament, and is covered with hand-painted red hearts about the size of the palm of your hand. There are more than 250,000 individually hand-painted hearts, each representing a person who died in the UK from COVID during those four unforgettable years, 2020-2023.
Each heart has been painted and placed there by a loved friend, family member, or sometimes by one of the volunteers who care for the wall. Inside many hearts, people have written a few words. “Helen, I shall always love you. Frank.” Or, “In my heart forever dearest Reshma, January, 2022.” Or, “Love you, Nov 2023,” followed by a quote in Mandarin. And the most poignant for me, “8-26-24 Grandad Love You. xxxxxx.” In some hearts, there are simply names, eg, Frank, Sarah, Jasmin.
This is the British National COVID Memorial Wall. The first heart was painted on it on March 29, 2021, and is a visual representation of the UK’s catastrophic loss of people to COVID-19. It was created by bereaved families for bereaved families, but in November 2025, the UK government announced it would be preserved. The government “recognised the significance of the Wall and its role in providing a space for reflection, remembrance and grieving and stated that it would work “with The Friends of the Wall and local partners, to preserve the National COVID Memorial Wall as a memorial to the lives lost in the UK to COVID-19.”
One person has said it best: “It’s a place of understanding, where everyone has felt heartache. It also feels like all our loved ones have been laid to rest together … I never really had a place for my dad to rest. But with his heart on the wall, it’s a place of remembering for me.”
There are smaller examples of memorials to COVID around the world. Ireland has a Memorial Tree. There is a COVID Memorial Pyramid in Maryland and Belgium has created six “Onuments”, designed for reflection, mourning and solace. The British is the largest.
The appreciation of the government of Great Britain for the Wall comes at a time when the UK COVID Inquiry has ended after already publishing two reports into the handling of the pandemic by the government. Both were critical of health officials and leading politicians.
Inquiry chairwoman, former judge Baroness Hallett, said the UK’s response could be summarised as “too little, too late.”
Some of the main findings were:
“The lockdown could have been avoided if steps such as social distancing and isolating those with symptoms, along with members of their household, had been introduced earlier.”
The report describes a “toxic and chaotic” culture at the heart of the UK government during its response to the pandemic, which it said affected the quality of advice and decision-making.”
On children, the report says, while the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 undoubtedly saved lives, they also “left lasting scars on society and the economy, brought ordinary childhood to a halt, delayed the diagnosis and treatment of other health issues and exacerbated societal inequalities.
“Children were not prioritised enough, with ministers failing to consider properly the consequences of school closures.”
It concludes that the vast majority of children were not at risk of serious direct harm from COVID, “but suffered greatly from the closure of schools and requirement to stay at home.”’
In T&T also, we knew children were not getting seriously sick and rarely transmitting the virus from October 2020. Yet, government wrongly insisted on keeping them locked up for another two years.
Some of the recommendations that the Inquiry made are pertinent to our situation: a) Improve consideration of the impact decisions might have on people—both by the illness and the steps taken to respond to it. b) Create expert groups to advise on economic and social implications, not just the science. c) Ensure decisions—and their implications—are clearly communicated to the public and d) Enable greater parliamentary scrutiny of emergency powers.
The UK COVID memorial was conceived and constructed by the bereaved families of those who died, not by the government which locked down people unnecessarily, nor by clueless parliamentarians or useless hospital administrators.
It’s also instructive that the UK government had to be forced into establishing the UK National COVID-19 Inquiry by many of those same families who founded the Memorial Wall.
The question then is, what happened in T&T? Why the silence about the COVID outbreak here?
