A moving exhibition showing thousands of shrouded figures laid out on the ground to honour the servicemen who died during World War One and have no known grave has gone in display at London's Olympic Park.
A total of 72,396 12-inch figures will be laid out to represent every Commonwealth serviceman who died at the Somme and were never given a proper grave.
The Shroud of the Somme has been opened to mark the centenary of the end of the World War One.
Artist Rob Heard, 53, has spent three-and-a-half-years hand making the shrouds and says that each one is linked to a man who was known to have been fighting but whose body was never found.
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Rob says: "The key to this is about the individual, so that is why the way we've chosen to lay these figures out there - with a gap between them.
"It is an ordered gap which is so important because they are individuals. They're not a mass, and each one is made to a name."
The artist said he began the project after injuring his hands in a car crash, telling the Metro: "I was feeling sorry for myself post-surgery, and I was just looking at the guys coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq at the time without their legs and with arms off, and just started thinking "come off it, get it together".
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"The idea for making the shrouds was just an epiphany, I can't actually remember how that came around. I just started to do it.
"I wasn't commissioned or asked to do it."
The display opened on Thursday and will run until Sunday 18 November when the figures will be sold off to raise money for military charities.
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Over one million soldiers died or were wounded during the Battle of the Somme 1916, it was one of the bloodiest of WWI. The battle began on 1 July 1916 and ended 19 November of the same year. On the first day of the battle alone, 19,240 British soldiers died and thousands more were injured.
Rob says that he worked long days to get the project finished, adding: "I knew exactly what I was doing every day and I did it for 12 hours a day for three-and-a-half years, every single day."
Featured Image Credit: PA
Topics: uk news