The UK AIDS Memorial Quilt Partnership is deeply saddened to learn of the death of Ally Van Tillo (formerly Alastair Hume), founder of the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt, who died at home on Sunday 30 August, surrounded by his family.
Ally was inspired by the American Names Project Memorial Quilt to create a UK version. He coordinated the making of panels from across the country, bringing together grieving families, friends and lovers who had nowhere else to turn, and took the Quilt to displays across the country, including its first full display in Hyde Park in 1994.
At a time when government and much of the media still treated people with HIV as figures of shame rather than loss, the Quilt put names and human stories to the crisis. It insisted that those who had died – often in secrecy – were people with full lives, passions, friendships and families, remembered by people who put their love into every stitch. That work helped shift public attitudes and pushed those in power to finally take the pandemic, and the people affected by it, seriously. This work continues today. Medicine has changed HIV but understanding has not kept pace, and the challenge left is the ongoing stigma that surrounds it.
Ally never sought credit for this. Those who worked alongside him remember someone who saw the Quilt as belonging to the hundreds of makers and volunteers who stitched it, as a project of collective grief and activism rather than individual achievement.
Siobhán Lanigan, Chair of the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt Partnership, said:
“Ally’s vision and dedication gave the UK a way to remember people the country had too often chosen to forget. Everything the Partnership does today carries on the work he started, and we all owe him, and the panel makers and volunteers who made the Quilt with him, an enormous debt.”
The Quilt will continue to be displayed across the UK as a living tribute to Ally’s work and to everyone it commemorates. This September, it returns to Scotland for the first time in full with a display at Tramway, Glasgow – the country where Ally started the UK Quilt in Edinburgh in the late 1980s. The exhibition, and its accompanying public programme, will stand as a tribute to his legacy, and the Partnership hopes it will be a place for those who knew him, and those who benefited from his work, to come together and remember him.
Photo Credits:
Archive image of Ally Van Tillo with the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt – Image courtesy of Waverley Care
Portrait of Ally Van Tillo, 2025 – Joe Magowan
