Half the Sky・Women Worth Remembering

History is rich with women whose achievements speak for themselves. Wu Zetian ruled Tang China as emperor in her own name. Ada Lovelace published the first algorithm written for a machine, and saw that computing could go beyond numbers. Junko Tabei stood on the summit of Everest. Wangari Maathai planted a movement of fifty million trees and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Half the Sky gathers twenty four of these women on one wall, each carved as a plaster relief, and lets you do something no textbook allows: ask her about it, in your own words. Every conversation centres on what she did. Ask what she built, what she proved, what it cost her, what she would say to someone attempting something hard today. Each woman speaks from a fact checked character card with linked sources, reviewed line by line and published as an open dataset, so what she says can always be traced to the record. Where history is uncertain, she says so. The wall is fully bilingual. A grandmother in Chengdu and a schoolgirl in Croydon can ask Marie Curie the same question and meet the same person, because these women never belonged to a single language, and remembering them should not either. Designed, written and built by one person, Half the Sky is free and open to everyone for all nine days of the Festival, no ticket, no queue. On 18 September, eight more women join the wall, growing the collection from twenty four to thirty two. The name comes from the saying that women hold up half the sky. Spend an evening here and you may find that saying undersells them.