Pan-Commonwealth Schools Project
The Millennium Tapestry
While
looking through the web site you will see this logo in
several places. When you do, then simply hover your
mouse pointer over it to see some special ‘Fast Facts’.
Make sure you spend time looking at the Virtual Millennium Tapestry, where you can enjoy all the wonderful individual canvases and in many cases read how the schools made them and what the different images portray. The canvases are marvellous individually, but when you see them together in a big exhibition they are quite breathtaking.
The travelling exhibitions have come to an end with St Paul's Cathedral and the special display for the Coronation Day Children’s Party at Buckingham Palace.
The Artistic Achievement
The vision of The Millennium Tapestry was to celebrate
the times we live in from the vantage point of the millennium, but
through the eyes of children, to illustrate an element of life as
lived by the children in their schools, reflecting their hopes,
aspirations, opportunities and the issues that affected them, local,
national or global.
The
individual canvases are very beautiful, sometimes quite serious
in their content, but often also very witty. The whole tapestry
reveals the children’s great sense of pride in their schools and
communities, and their work can only inspire us to look forward with
confidence to a future in their hands.
We
mounted thirty-four major public
exhibitions
across the United Kingdom, in museums, art galleries, cathedrals
and other buildings of national heritage.
In addition to these we took generally smaller display to a number of special events, in places like the Pump Room in Bath and the Natural History Museum, Westminster Abbey and the Commonwealth Institute in London. We held a week-long exhibition in the Houses of Parliament. Although this was not open to the general public, twenty-one school parties were able to visit it through invitations from their own MPs. Sections of the tapestry were involved in the ‘Global Issues’ open day in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which attracted several thousand visitors.
On 2nd June 2003 we put up a large display of the Millennium Tapestry, together with the first completed canvases in the Golden Tapestry, for the Coronation Day Children’s Party for 500 underprivileged children at Buckingham Palace, which was attended by the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Earl and Countess of Wessex.
All
the exhibitions during 2002, which included those in Canterbury,
St Albans, Exeter, Truro and St Paul’s Cathedrals and shows in
Earth Centre and the Nature in Art Gallery were an official part
of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebrations. Three exhibitions in
the North West, in Manchester Cathedral, the two Liverpool
Cathedrals and at the Manchester
Commonwealth Games themselves additionally formed part of the
Commonwealth Games Spirit of Friendship Festival, the last
showcasing the entire tapestry for the first time.
The most important and enduring legacy in the United Kingdom is the broadening and deepening of the education of the children who took part, and the building and strengthening of the schools’ links with their local communities.
The
Millennium Tapestry has additionally served as a model
for other projects, both within the United Kingdom and elsewhere
in the world. Many local schools’ projects have made use of the
networks built for the Millennium Tapestry. The Golden Tapestry
involves schools across the whole Commonwealth. A similar project
is now planned in the United States.
.