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

behind the Uniform is a new permanent artwork created with more than 500 children and community participants from across the West Midlands.

Commissioned as part of Fashion Police, a National Lottery Heritage Fund project developed by West Midlands Police Museum in collaboration with Birmingham City University, the work explores a simple idea: what happens when we stop looking only at the uniform and begin looking at the community behind it?

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

During summer 2026 I worked with more than 20 community groups, largely through the Bring It On Brumprogramme, engaging with more than 500 children and community participants.

The workshops were deliberately simple.

Older children were invited to create a face behind the uniform. There was no prescribed idea of what that face should look like. The intention was to give them the freedom to interpret the idea in their own way.

For younger children, I created a series of police-inspired drawings that could be coloured, altered and transformed.

At the beginning of the workshops I showed the children how the final artwork was being constructed from hundreds of tiny individual images. I then asked them to help me finish it by creating the images that would become part of the mosaic.

Their drawings were not preliminary sketches or workshop material destined for a folder.

They became the artwork.

The community workshops produced 875 individual images.

These were brought together with more than 40 quotations taken from oral histories recorded during the Fashion Police project, alongside photographs and historical material from the West Midlands Police archive.

Together they formed a working library of approximately 1,200 unique images.

Every one of them appears within the finished artwork.

Seen from a distance, Behind the Uniform presents six figures spanning different periods in the history of policing.

Move towards the artwork and those figures begin to change.

Uniforms, faces and silhouettes break apart into hundreds of smaller images: children's drawings, community artwork, archive photographs and fragments of lived experience.

The closer you look, the less the work becomes about the uniform itself.

Instead, the community begins to emerge.

That transformation is central to the piece and to the original ambition of the Fashion Police project: to encourage a greater understanding of the people behind policing and the relationship between police and the communities they serve.

behind the Uniform measures 1,650 mm wide × 1,100 mm high.

The image has been produced as a large-format backlit textile graphic and will be presented within a lightbox, giving the individual images within the mosaic an illuminated depth when viewed in person.

The work will be installed at West Midlands Police Museum in Birmingham on 8 September 2026, where it will become part of the Museum's permanent display.

The physical installation is only one part of Behind the Uniform.

I have also created a digital artwork that reveals the construction of the piece and allows the hundreds of individual contributions to be experienced in a way that is impossible when simply looking at a photograph of the finished mosaic.

The digital work moves between the individual images and the finished composition, making visible the extraordinary number of separate contributions contained within the six figures.

Watch Behind the Uniform:
https://youtu.be/UZwSALV4avc

Although I designed and constructed behind the Uniform, its visual language belongs to hundreds of people.

Some contributions are careful portraits. Others are exuberant drawings, unexpected interpretations, colours, symbols, police helmets, people, patterns and wonderfully individual responses to a very open question.

Placed together, they become something none of the individual images could become alone.

A portrait not simply of policing, but of a community looking at policing, responding to it and ultimately becoming part of the artwork itself.

behind the Uniform
Allan Levy
2026

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

Final project and funding credits will be updated following confirmation from West Midlands Police Museum.