Help The Hungry: Pop artist Peter Blake backs campaign with series of limited edition prints

The prints will be sold for £1,000 each and all profits will go to The Felix Project, our campaign partner supplying vulnerable Londoners with fresh food

Pop artist Sir Peter Blake has produced a series of signed limited edition prints of the rainbow poster he created to support the work of our Help The Hungry campaign in the capital, in conjunction with our sister title the Evening Standard.

Sir Peter, 87, known as the Godfather of British pop art and the man behind some of the most widely recognised album covers of all time including the latest Who album and The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper, will produce 100 prints of his iconic rainbow motif, London Stands Together.

The prints will be sold for £1,000 each (exclusive of VAT) on a first-come-first-served basis. All profits will go to The Felix Project, our campaign partner supplying vulnerable Londoners with fresh food and the biggest supplier of surplus food in the capital. It is expected to raise nearly £100,000 for our appeal.

Sir Peter, a renowned painter who has also designed sleeves for Oasis, Eric Clapton, Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas and Ian Dury, said the prints would be handmade on Somerset cotton rag traditional printmaking paper and that he was thrilled to back our appeal.

His support comes amid warnings from government forecasters that unemployment could soar by more than two million this spring due to the coronavirus crisis and a YouGov poll showing hunger beginning to bite, with millions more people in Britain experiencing food poverty. The Felix Project has responded by tripling its food supply, ramping up from 10 tonnes to almost 30 tonnes a day, as distress across the capital deepens.

Sir Peter Blake attends the Stella McCartney Menswear launch and Women’s Spring 2017 collection presentation at Abbey Road Studios in November (Dave Benett)

Mark Curtin, CEO of The Felix Project, spoke on behalf of the London Food Alliance, which was formed with fellow redistributors FareShare and City Harvest to supply surplus food to community hubs set up in response to the coronavirus.

Sir Peter is the man behind some of the most widely recognised album covers of all time including the latest Who album and The Beatles’ ‘Sgt Pepper’ (Sir Peter Blake)

So far, 15 of the 33 local authorities in the capital have established hubs to receive and distribute food and are taking deliveries with more due to open their doors later this week.

Mr Curtin said: “The London Food Alliance partners are working with all the local authorities and I am pleased to report a great deal of progress in the past week, resulting in many more hubs up and running, which means we are redistributing hundreds of tonnes of nutritious surplus food to them each week.

“We will continue to work closely with hub operators as well as hundreds of other charities, community organisations and schools to ensure that the needs of London’s most vulnerable people are met throughout this health crisis and beyond.”

Our appeal has raised £1.65m so far thanks to the generosity of charitable foundations, corporates, philanthropists and more than 1,000 members of the public.

The Independent is encouraging readers to help groups that are trying to feed the hungry across the country — find out how you can help here. Follow this link to donate to our campaign in London, in partnership with the Evening Standard.