Remembering Together is a national programme that has brought communities and creative practitioners together in collective acts of reflection, remembrance, hope and healing.
Previously managed by greenspace scotland and support provided by the Scottish Government, memorial projects have been co-created in every local authority area of Scotland. Communities have worked with creative practitioners to honour those that have lost their lives to Covid-19 and reflect on their own experiences. We are delighted to be leading this programme on behalf of the Dundee City.
Dundee’s Remembering Together Covid Memorial will be a free Garden and Labyrinth on Caird Avenue and Moncur Crescent. Construction began on 1 December 2025 and is due to be completed by Summer 2026.
Phase 1 - 2022
Vinishree Verma and Ana Guerrero of Design Studio, Around Zero were the lead designers for Phase 1 of the Remembering Together: Co-creating Covid Community Memorials programme for Dundee.
Phase 1 of this programme was where memorial ideas and concepts were developed with local communities. The design brief was very open, allowing each local community to develop their ideas across vast forms from permanent commemorative gardens, public or digital artworks, to theatre or music performance events, or events in parks, greenspaces or other types of public space.
Vinishree and Ana worked with a number of community groups across the city to gather initial ideas which will be realised in Phase 2 of this programme.
Phase 2 - 2023-2026
Phase 2 of the Remembering Together programme is where ideas and concepts generated by local communities in Phase 1 are transformed into a final memorial for the city.
Phase 2’s creative team for Dundee consisted of designer Dan Kingston of Old School Fabrications and designer, Vinishree Verma of Around Zero, who have transformed the ideas co-created by local communities in Phase 1 into a permanent memorial for the city. This will take the form of a garden and labyrinth next to Moncur Crescent Playpark in Coldside.
UNESCO City of Design Dundee, together with Dundee City Council are progressing the design’s development and memorial construction.
During Phase One of the Remembering Together project for Dundee, we delivered a series of co-design workshops with a completely open brief.
There was no set memorial style, location or duration to allow the ideas and ambitions of Dundee’s Co-Created Covid Memorial to be led by its communities. These community workshops were delivered by design studio, Around Zero who have continued to support our memorial design and public engagement sessions throughout Phase Two.
The workshops began by allowing open and honest conversations around individual experiences of the pandemic. Intergenerational barriers were broken down by both young people and elderly participants listening to one another’s emotional experiences and understanding each other’s point of view. Families who took part also found this an insightful and reflective exercise after spending lockdown together under one roof.
Around Zero then introduced what a memorial could mean to different people, and shared mixed examples from across the world. This inspired the 122 participants who took part in Phase One’s workshops to begin developing their own ideas for what Dundee’s covid memorial could be.
At the end of our Phase One workshops, we held a full day of designing where participants were split into four groups to work together and develop their own ideas for the memorial. There were many similar values across all four designs including: its connection to nature, its openness and inclusiveness and its ability to allow people to reflect.
The proposed co-created memorial concept is a colourful, interactive outdoor labyrinth which will offer areas of play and reflection.
“Our group came up with lots of different ideas which we’ve tried to incorporate into this design. We have designed a memorial park which includes a labyrinth that people can walk through, reflect and take a moment. It would be a journey of the covid experience which you come out of and into the park.
We have planned to have a playpark for children as we want it to be very family orientated. Young people and children were affected during the covid times as they couldn’t go out and play with their friends, so became very isolated. We want to encourage play and for people to feel included again.”
Lucy Binnie, Dundee City Council Youth Worker, October 2022
The idea of creating a labyrinth has come from the group’s ambition of representing the unexpected twists and turns experienced during the pandemic.
“Walking a labyrinth takes us through numerous twists and turns that symbolize the ebb and flow of life.”
Labyrinths are known to reduce stress, aid mental health and community building. They can encourage meditation, mindfulness and connection.
This concept was selected so that Dundee’s memorial will be one central place for people to go and reflect. This was important to the majority of people who took part in our workshops. Creating the feeling of being in a bright, open and outdoor green space was equally important to the group.
In Phase 2, we held drop in designs on the first Monday of each month where new and returning community co-creators contributed towards the memorial’s design and development.
These were held at Coldside Library across from the memorial’s location from June – December 2023. People could come and hear from the project team about the co-creation process, and take part in designing the memorial garden. 28 individuals came from across Dundee and included: young people living in areas of multiple deprivation, young families living in Coldside, students living and working in the city, ethnic minority women, elderly people who have experienced isolation as a result of the pandemic restrictions and grieving individuals who lost loved ones throughout the pandemic.
Whilst working with Dundee City Council and community forums to find the right green space for this memorial, it was proposed to utilise and transform underused land beside the Fiveways Roundabout, across from Coldside Library. This site is perfect as it is a central location that can be accessed by many different bus routes from across Dundee.
With a site secured, we were delighted to welcome Old School Fabrications to the project team to develop the labyrinth design. Working closely with Vinishree Verma of Around Zero, designer Dan Kingston has developed a design that captures the community’s key ideas and ambitions for Dundee’s covid memorial. Construction is underway with the Memorial set to open to the public in Summer 2026.
