A conceptual artist is pledging to mark the "British reaction" to the Holocaust by toppling six million tiles.

Each tile would represent a Jewish person killed by Nazis during the Second World War.

Julian Hanford, of Wimbledon, hopes to crowdfund £1.6m to fund the memorial event, which will see domino-shaped tiles covering the size of a Premier League football pitch toppled over 12 hours.

The 54-year-old former advertising creative director has asked the world-record-holding domino toppler to design the installation layout.

The tiles will fall one by one after the first one is toppled by a Holocaust survivor.

Hanford, who is not Jewish but has maternal Jewish relatives, said: "I thought I could do something that could show people a sense of the scale of the human loss.

"A lot of organisations focus on individual stories which is absolutely right but I wanted the event to be a time people stop for a moment and go 'oh my God, that's so big!'

"One of the things that struck me about the victims of the Holocaust was that after everything they went through, the last thing they were denied was a grave stone of their own...a permanent memorial for them."

FALL - WE SHALL REMEMBER from Julian Hanford, Artist on Vimeo.

A campaign video featuring the artist's 13-year-old daughter Aurelia includes hard-hitting archive footage from Nazi concentration camps

Mr Hanford is working with theatre director Jessica Wretlind to organise the event.

He hopes the short video they create will be shown in schools.

If he can pull it off, the tiles, marked with the word 'Fall' and the dates of the Holocaust, would become a memorial symbol signifying inclusion in the same way the Poppy symbol came to represent soldiers killed during WWI.

He said: "It's really a message to us all, regardless of whether we are Jewish, German or British.

"Just look at the state we are getting into with Islamophobia. We just need to grow up as a species, I think we can't treat people like this just because their beliefs don't fit your own. The Holocaust itself an example of how it can go wrong."

Mr Hanford said he chose to crowdfund the event, rather than seek corporate sponsorship, because he wanted people to engage by making a financial pledge, however small.

He also started a social media campaign, encouraging people to photograph themselves with a sign stating "Fall: We Shall Remember".

A location has not yet been found for the installation, which will take two and a half weeks to assemble - but Hanford said Alexandra Palace in north London was a possible option.

The tiles would stand for six days, to represent the six years of conflict. On the sixth day they would be toppled, row after row, in an event watched by a live audience and live-streamed around the world.

Mr Hanford, who has been a professional artist for the past five years, hopes to stage the event on January 27 next year, which is Holocaust Memorial Day.

He first learnt about the Holocaust as a cub scout on a tour of Germany aged 13.

He said: "We went to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp...I'll never forget the feeling in the place itself, it's something I can't explain.

"It was quite horrible and I just wanted to get out as quickly as possible and that stayed with me for a long time and I have always been interested in how we could get to the place in Europe where you can systematically destroy millions of people."

Wimbledon Times:

The self-taught artist, who has worked as an advertising creative director for companies including Specsavers and Saatchi & Saatchi, where he was a senior art director, has focused on portraiture "with a conceptual twist" in his previous work.

He said: "I think professionally this will be the most ambitious project I will ever do in my life...You wake up sometimes and think, should I be bothering with it? But sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and go for it.

"Now I have set my stall out, not to do it would be an insult to the victims of the Holocaust."

To find out more about the project, visit fall15.com.

To support the campaign, visit phundee.com/reward/campaign/fall.

What do you think? Comment below, or email louisa.clarence@london.newsquest.co.uk.