A schools arts project celebrating the River Thames

Managed by The Millennium Tapestry Company in partnership with the Thames Heritage Trust

The Millennium Tapestry Company

The Millennium Tapestry Company is a non profit distributing limited company set up to run collaborative arts projects for schools that support and enrich the national curriculum. The projects' outcomes are wonderful artworks which often constitute enduring legacies of events or anniversaries; they also help children learn about issues like caring for the environment, recycling and reducing energy consumption, appreciating cultural differences as a means of promoting social cohesion and global citizenship and understanding disability. Children are encouraged to take pride in their local area and schools to form enduring links with their wider communities. All our projects are fully inclusive: schools from very different communities take part and special schools are able to contribute on a level playing field with other schools.

We have run two major schools arts projects, the Millennium Tapestry which involved 1,700 schools across Britain and the Golden Tapestry with 800 schools in 48 Commonwealth countries and territories. The resultant artworks have been exhibited widely in prestigious venues like Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, the British and Natural History Museums and fourteen cathedrals (including Durham, St Paul's and Canterbury, and exhibition centres like SECC Glasgow, Cardiff International Arena and NEC Birmingham as well as at major Commonwealth events in Australia, Malta and Uganda. We have also organized smaller-scale schools tapestry projects in Milton Keynes, in the area around Banbury and in Bicester in Oxfordshire. The dedicated websites have achieved high profiles nationally and internationally. Our tapestries are collaborative single artworks, made up of metre-square canvases made by individual schools. We own a specially designed modular free-standing stainless steel display system from which we can hang from 12 to more than 1,000 canvases.