The Francis Crick Institute, A Drop of Hope

From January to August 2021, the Manby Gallery, the Francis Crick Institute’s public exhibition and events space, was converted to an NHS vaccination centre as part of the national vaccine campaign. It offered up to 1000 vaccines a day at peak capacity, a total of 46,836 people came to the Manby Gallery to receive their vaccine. People who came to get their jab were given postcards prompting them to reflect on their feelings towards the vaccination and their experiences of the pandemic.

A Drop of Hope was a participatory art project, run in collaboration between the Francis Crick Institute and Poet in the City, using voices of the community to transform the NHS Covid-19 vaccination centre at the Francis Crick into an evolving display of poetry. Using poems written by 12 poets in residence in response to the visitor contributions, we were commissioned to develop an installation which would enhance the experience of visitors to the vaccination centre, by conveying the importance of their contribution to the national vaccination programme.

Our design concept aimed to acknowledge the individual actions of those coming to be vaccinated and how their involvement built up to a larger collaborative effort by reflecting voices of the community in a layered and dynamic spatial collage of poetry and colour.

The visual language, structures and fixing mechanisms took inspiration from the temporary Covid signage that was installed in urgent and therefore mostly makeshift ways around the world during the pandemic. To reduce potential anxieties and apprehension and to subvert these physical manifestations of the pandemic we chose a bright and friendly colour scheme consisting of 12 tones, one for each poem. The palette is loosely based around the rainbow, which came to be a symbol of hope and solidarity with the NHS and key workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Without just replicating this visual shorthand, our concept made use of a deconstructed version of this symbol as the backbone for the project, while also reflecting on mainstream messaging and iconography in a critical way.

The physical structures were designed to act as an intermediary between architecture and poetry as the building’s sheer size, imposing architecture and prominence in the mostly residential Somers Town area was one of the key challenges to address. Coloured panels of poetry were fastened to mundane architectural elements, including windows, railings and columns as well as bespoke structures, using off the shelf components and fixing mechanisms to turn an otherwise slightly cold an uninviting part of the building into a celebration of the collective vaccination effort.

The cumulative effort of the community’s inoculation was also reflected in a phased approach of the installation, with new clusters of poems being added gradually over the duration of the NHS vaccination centre’s tenure at the Francis Crick Institute. During each phase visitor responses were collected and processed by a new group of the 12 poets in residence. We hosted design workshops and language consultations with each group, to ensure we presented the poems in a way that was sympathetic to the content and to select pull quotes to display alongside the full poems. An underlying system, comprising of 5 set formats based on A-sizes – a nod to the A5 postcards that visitors were given to record their contributions – a fixed set of type sizes and consistent grid allowed the complex display to remain structured and accessible.