A FARNHAM woman originally from Ypres (Ieper) in Belgium returned to her home town earlier this month ahead of the 100th anniversary commemorations of the end of the First World War.

Kristel Bacon has lived in Farnham for 21 years and runs clothing alterations shop Stitched in Time in Borelli Yard. She lived until the age of 19 in Ypres which, some decades earlier, found itself at the centre of three of the bloodiest battles of the Great War.

On returning to Belgium to visit her parents on November 5, Kristel visited St George Memorial Church, built in 1929 as a memorial to British and Commonwealth troops, to see its moving ‘poppy cascade’ (pictured).

In the build-up to the centenary of the Armistice, the church – where Kristel also married her first husband, a British serviceman – invited members of the public to make felt poppies, to “honour the memory of all those whose lives were changed for ever between 1914 and 1918”.

Thousands of British and Belgian people have since contributed to a patchwork of around 15,000 poppies, which was hung from the church on November 3.