A community-created artwork for West Midlands Police Museum, Birmingham

behind the Uniform began with a simple idea: to look beyond the uniform and explore the people and communities behind it.

Commissioned by West Midlands Police Museum as part of the Fashion Police project, I wanted to create a piece that could bring together many different voices while still working as a single, powerful image.

“From across the room you see the uniform. As you move closer, the uniform disappears and you begin to see the community.”

The finished artwork depicts six figures drawn from different periods in the history of policing in the West Midlands. But the figures themselves are only part of the story.

Look more closely and they begin to disappear.

In their place are hundreds of children's drawings, photographs, archive images and fragments of people's experiences. The people who took part in the project don't simply sit alongside the finished artwork. They are physically part of its image.

During the summer of 2026, I worked with more than 500 children and community participants across the West Midlands.

I wanted participation to be genuinely open, particularly because the workshops involved children of very different ages and abilities.

With older children, I introduced the idea of creating a “face behind the uniform”, but deliberately left the interpretation to them. There was no template and no idea of a right answer. I wanted their personalities and their own ways of seeing to come through.

For younger children, I drew a series of police-inspired images that they could colour, alter and make their own.

At each workshop I showed the children how their contribution would become part of the finished piece. That was important to me. They weren't making something that might later inspire the artwork.

What they made was the artwork.

By the end of the workshops, the children and community participants had created 875 individual pieces.

I brought these together with photographs and historical material from the West Midlands Police archive and more than 40 quotations drawn from oral histories recorded during the wider Fashion Police project.

Working with such a large and varied collection of material was an important part of developing the piece. I wanted to preserve the individuality of the contributions while allowing them collectively to create another image entirely.

From a distance, the six uniformed figures dominate.

As you approach, they begin to fragment. Faces, jackets and silhouettes give way to drawings, photographs, words, colours and individual marks.

And eventually the hierarchy reverses.

The uniform becomes the background and the individual people become the subject.

That shift in perspective is at the heart of behind the Uniform. I was interested in making something that rewards getting closer, both physically and metaphorically.

It also reflects something that runs through much of my work: the idea that a large public artwork can be made from hundreds of very small, very personal contributions without those individual voices disappearing.

I designed and constructed behind the Uniform, but I couldn't have predicted exactly what it would eventually look like.

That is one of the things I value about working collaboratively.

There are careful portraits and wonderfully uninhibited drawings. There are unexpected colours, symbols, patterns, police helmets and faces. Some contributions are thoughtful and precise; others are gloriously spontaneous.

I didn't want to tidy that individuality away.

Together, those contributions have become a portrait not simply of policing, but of a community looking at policing, questioning it, responding to it and becoming part of the image itself.

For me, that is what behind the Uniform is really about.

From across the room, you see six uniforms.

Up close, you see hundreds of people.

behind the Uniform
Allan Levy, 2026

Permanent artwork for West Midlands Police Museum, Birmingham.

Commissioned by West Midlands Police Museum as part of the Fashion Police project, developed in collaboration with Birmingham City University and supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund.