The Poppy Appeal raised £56.6m in 2025 for work to support serving personnel, veterans and their families.

For Remembrance Day, we are looking out over a field of poppies, recognised as symbols of remembrance for more than a century.

Long known to flourish in the disturbed earth of battlefields, poppies were among the only plants to grow in the barren fields of northern France and Flanders in Belgium, after World War One. Their symbolism inspired the wartime poem In Flanders Fields, written by Canadian serviceman John McCrae in 1915. The poppy was later adopted by the Royal British Legion and artificial poppies made from silk were first sold in the UK in 1921, to raise money for ex-servicemen and the families of the fallen.

Our homepage today shows the Sun over a field of poppies, evoking the words of another World War One poem. The most famous lines of Laurence Binyon's poem, For the Fallen, are still used in remembrance services and on war memorials worldwide: "At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them."