‘I lost the use of two fingers making the Tower of London poppies but I don't regret it'

Yahoo

03-05-2025

A week after returning from hospital, where his right hand had been painstakingly reconstructed after being crushed in a clay roller, Paul Cummins was back at work – to continue the process of hand-making 888,246 ceramic poppies for a centenary installation at the Tower of London. In total, Cummins estimates he made 23,000 himself, with a team of 300 other workers – some rounded up from his alma mater, the University of Derby, some agency workers – completing the rest.
'I put a bin bag over my hand and went back looking like one of those Chinese lucky cat ornaments,' he says. Luckily, he says, the accident 'killed all the nerves in my hand, so I didn't feel anything. I did lose my middle finger, and I'd lost [use] of my ring finger on that hand, which is locked in a strained position.'
This was May 2014, and Cummins, a ceramic artist from Derbyshire, was responsible for creating the poppies – one for each British or Colonial life lost during the First World War – that would be 'planted' in undulating waves in the moat of the Tower of London to mark the centenary of the First World War. For nine months, his workshop was operating 24 hours a day. 'I'm a very compulsive person, and a control freak… I did get a bit miserable,' he says. 'But the people who were working with me, they kept my spirits up.'
It was worth it in the end. Cast your mind back to the last days of summer in 2014, and you may remember the enormous impact Cummins's installation at the Tower of London had around the world. It was titled Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, and Cummins's ceramic artwork was displayed in an arresting river of red poppies around the Tower by the stage designer Tom Piper.
It was visited by the then- Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (now, of course, the Prince and Princess of Wales) and Prince Harry on the day it opened, on August 5, and by the late Queen and Prince Philip in October that year. Over the course of the four months it was on display, more than five million people visited, making it the most talked about – and arguably most successful – public art installation in living memory. Politicians including David Cameron, then Prime Minister, called for it to be extended, but Cummins insisted it was supposed to be transient.
Now, however, the poppies are back at the Tower. We are speaking over Zoom and Cummins, aged 47, is in his garden in Derbyshire ahead of the unveiling of a new poppy installation to mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day. The poppies are fewer in number – 33,000 compared to the original 888,246 – but they are displayed within the Tower itself (so only visible if you buy a ticket to enter) in a striking 'explosion' of red in front of the iconic White Tower, with a cascade of poppies from its upper left-hand corner. On a bright morning in May, they look as majestic as they did a decade ago, glinting in the sunlight.
The poppies on display have been taken out of storage from the Imperial War Museum – Cummins had always insisted that he wouldn't make any more. 'The idea of it being transient was really important, because it [represented] the bodies going back,' he says. 'Each one represents a soldier, his soul, and they go back to where they came from.'
The majority of them, in fact, were sold for £25 to raise money for military charities – more on that later – but a number were taken on tour around the country and then maintained within the Imperial War Museum's collection. Within a day or two of Queen Elizabeth's visit to the Tower, every poppy made available to buy had sold out. For Cummins, the poppies entrusted to the Museum represent 'the unnamed soldiers… the bodies that never went back.'
Is he worried that, this time round, the installation won't have the same impact? 'It won't… but it doesn't have to,' he says. 'It's a totally different installation on its own.' In some ways, though, it feels 'like an old friend… I'm really excited about it all, and it's all the emotion from last time building up,' he says. 'I love the idea of it being recreated in the way it has. It has a familiarity, a comfort, but it also has… new stories to tell.'
Cummins grew up in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, the son of a builder and a healthcare worker. He has one brother, who still lives nearby with his two children – Cummins, who is single and without kids, lives with his mum in the Derbyshire countryside. His father died suddenly 20 years ago from a heart attack at work and he had impressed on his son to take courses that would lead to secure employment.
So after Cummins left school, he spent two years at catering college and then trained as an architectural model maker before finally choosing to follow his passion and complete a degree in craft – now called fine art – at the University of Derby's College of Arts. He graduated in 2010 and set up a ceramics studio shortly after. His first big break came two years later, when he was chosen as one of the artists with disabilities – Cummins has severe dyslexia – to produce an installation for a programme called Unlimited, which was commissioned to celebrate disabled artists' work for the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. His project, the English Flower Garden, consisted of six flower installations at six famous British residences, including Blenheim Palace and the Althorp estate.
When I ask what his father would have made of it all, Cummins says he 'probably would have told me to get a proper job'. He struggled at school, where 'dyslexia wasn't really a thing… I grew up in the Eighties in the north of England,' he says. 'They helped as much as they could and as much as they could understand… I was the kid who 'tried.' That was my report – I 'tried' a lot.'
His dyslexia, which was unearthed after he left school, makes reading a challenge. 'I don't read very well at all,' he says. 'I see colours instead of words.' He relies on technology to read out text messages and emails. It has been the dyslexia, however, that turned out to be the making of him.
He came up with the idea for Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at his local library – he had been considering a project in honour of the centenary of the First World War and was looking for inspiration. 'I force myself to go and look at things in libraries and attempt to read books,' he says, which he describes as 'one of [his] quirks.' 'I found a document [from someone] who fought in the First World War… and in that document was [the line] 'The blood swept lands and seas of red.' It was phonetically written, so I connected with it. It clicked something in my head, and I went to see how many people had died in the War.'
From there, fate stepped in. 'I rang so many people around the country to see if I could do an installation there,' he says. 'Mainly castles, because I needed the space. And then I rang the Tower of London, and my name is the same as someone's friend [the Tower's head of operations knew another Paul Cummins] – and I didn't shut up until they said, 'Ok, come in and pitch the project.' So I did. It was fortuitous – it was meant to happen. And it all fell into place from there – everything unfolded with momentum.'
The momentum was so great, in fact, that Cummins had to find hundreds of people to help create the poppies, each of which was hand-stamped from red clay and shaped at his workshop in Derbyshire, or Johnson Tiles in Tunstall, Stoke-on-Trent. 'I went from employing nobody to 300 people within two months, and that was a bit of a shock,' he says. 'We were open 24/7.'
For Cummins, the project came at a significant physical, emotional, and financial cost – he lost the use of two fingers and thousands of pounds. The project was criticised for the percentage of money that ended up going to charity: of the £23 million raised overall, £9.5 million was donated, including a £1.1 million VAT rebate. Most of the rest, however, went in costs, and Cummins says he made a 'modest loss in the thousands'.
On the injury, which happened when his clothing got caught in a rolling press, he says: 'I live with it and I move on… I believe doing [the poppy project] helped me get over doing what I did to my hand, because I didn't have to think about it.' He has been left with chronic pain in his right hand and limited use of his fingers, but he has found ways to continue working. 'I have to throw on the potter's wheel slightly differently – I have to use my palm, and things like that. And have a bit more of a rest, because it makes my hand ache,' he says. 'I don't dwell on it. If I dwell on it, I'd overthink it and make things worse.'
While the response was largely positive, the installation also drew criticism in some quarters. At the time, one critic called it 'a deeply aestheticised, prettified and toothless war memorial.' One academic said the installation marked 'another wave in the rising tide of British nationalism'. But Cummins believes we should be proud of the poppy and what it represents, now more than ever. 'I didn't read too much of the press for my sanity,' he says. 'But the people who say [the poppy] is nationalist, and so on… I think they're totally wrong. It's a symbol of hope, and a symbol of how beauty can come of great loss.'
Nevertheless, the poppies changed his life for the better. He was awarded the MBE in the 2015 New Year Honours, and is currently working on an 'immersive experience' for Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera in New York.
'I keep myself to myself, but once people know what I've done, they want to interact with me in a slightly different way, and they want to know more,' he says. 'It all worked out brilliantly. I don't really have any regrets… maybe just losing a finger. I think everything worked out as it was meant to work out. It was fate.'
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