LONDON.- The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have today, visited Waterloo in south London to mark the launch of the UK-wide Hold Still community exhibition, supported by the Co-op, which launched ‘Co-operate’ in April to help connect vulnerable people to local and national support initiatives and has recently provided emergency relief funding to 4,500 community causes.

The Duke and Duchess viewed the final one hundred Hold Still portraits displayed on billboards outside Waterloo station, one of 112 community exhibition sites in 80 towns, cities and areas across the UK. The Duke and Duchess were greeted by Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, Steve Murrells, Co-op Group, CEO and Sami Massalami Mohammed Elmassalami Ayad, a volunteer at a community Food Hub in Hackney, whose portrait, ‘Sami’ by Grey Hutton, is one of the Hold Still photographs on display. Their Royal Highnesses also visited St. Bartholomew’s Hospital where they met frontline workers including Joyce Duah, a specialist oncology pharmacist at the hospital, whose photograph ‘All In This Together’ was selected as one of the final portraits, and her two colleagues Amelia Chowdhury and Dipal Samuel who feature in the photograph.

Spearheaded by The Duchess of Cambridge, Patron of the National Portrait Gallery, Hold Still is an ambitious community project, launched in May 2020, to create a unique collective portrait of the UK during lockdown.

From today, the final selection of portraits, unveiled in a digital exhibition in September, will be exhibited for a period of four weeks on billboard and poster sites across the country, including at bus stops, in high streets and outside train stations. One of the portraits ‘Melanie, March 2020’, taken by Johannah Churchill, has been recreated as a hand-painted mural in Manchester city centre.




Groups of works will be shown on posters in cities such as Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester and London. Many of the portraits will also be displayed individually in the entrant’s hometown with locations ranging from Belfast, Liverpool and Southampton to more rural areas such as Blaenau Ffestiniog (Gwynedd), Delabole (Cornwall), Marston Moretaine (Bedfordshire), Knypersle (Staffordshire Moorlands) Oban (Argyll) and Thorpe Audlin (West Yorkshire). Some of the portraits will also feature on community screens in over 1,500 Co-op stores across the UK.

All one hundred works will also be on display at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire from 23 October until the 6 December.

Hold Still invited people of all ages from across the UK to submit a photographic portrait, which they had taken during lockdown, in a six-week period during May and June. A panel of judges, including the Duchess of Cambridge and National Portrait Gallery Director, Nicholas Cullinan, selected the final 100 portraits from 31,598 submissions.

Focussed on three core themes – Helpers and Heroes, Your New Normal and Acts of Kindness – the images selected present a unique record of our shared and individual experiences during this extraordinary period of history, conveying humour and grief, creativity and kindness, tragedy and hope.

The Hold Still online exhibition has had over 4.8 million page views to date.