Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen is raising awareness of blood cancer in memory of his father

Designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen opened up about his childhood with Lorraine on this morning's show – with his father’s rapid death following a diagnosis of cancer when Laurence was just eight years old and his mother suffering with MS.

He confessed: “It was a complicated period. I look back on it but I don’t see it as a tragic time. There were moments of great sadness but my mother worked so powerfully… we had our own kind of normal, there was an enormous amount of positivity in my childhood. But for years and years and years, I used to dread people asking about my family and my parents because I would say what happened and people would get really sad. It sounded like I was bought up in a Dickensian novel.”

He said he wanted to speak about blood cancer and is now working to raise awareness of the illness, 45 years after his father’s death. Laurence is promoting the Make Blood Cancer Visible campaign which you can learn more about here.