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The Hastings Embroidery was commissioned by Group Captain Ralph Ward and made by the Royal School of Needlework in 1965 to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings. It consists of 27 panels, each 9 by 3 feet, showing 81 great events in British history. It took 22 embroiderers 10 months to finish, and it is worked in appliqué by hand, with couched threads and cords, tweed from Scotland, fabrics from the Victoria and Albert Museum, and feathers from London Zoo.
It consists of 27 panels, each 9 x 3 ft, and shows 81 great events in British history. It took 22 embroiderers 10 months to finish.
The Hastings Embroidery is worked in applique by hand, with the addition of couched threads and cords, tweed from Scotland, fabrics from the Victoria and Albert Museum, and feathers from London Zoo.
The Embroidery was on public display in Hastings, firstly in the Town Hall and then at the White Rock Pavilion (a large theatre). It was taken from there and placed in storage. The interesting question now is - where is it now, and when will it be placed back on public display?
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The Hastings Embroidery invites comparison with the Bayeux tapestry deliberately: a Norman-conquest anniversary, a long narrative in cloth, and a national history told panel by panel. The differences are in the making. Bayeux is wool surface stitchery on linen; Hastings is hand appliqué, a technique chosen because applied fabric areas can cover 9-foot panels at a pace solid stitching never could, with couched threads and cords supplying line and detail on top of the applied shapes. The materials extend the appliqué idea beyond cloth alone — Scottish tweed for texture, fabrics supplied by the Victoria and Albert Museum, and feathers from London Zoo for the passages where real plumage reads better than any stitched imitation. It is a 20th-century work about an 11th-century event, built with a medieval technique used at exhibition scale.
The embroidery was on public display in Hastings, first in the Town Hall and then at the White Rock Pavilion, a large theatre — venues sized for a work whose panels demand distance to read. It was later taken down and placed in storage, and the question its chroniclers end on — where it is now, and when it will be placed back on public display — is the recurring problem of monumental textile art. Works of this scale need long walls, controlled light and conservation care that few venues can offer continuously, so some of the largest embroideries ever made spend much of their lives rolled in store. The Royal School of Needlework workmanship that made the panels durable enough to move and store is the same professionalism that runs through its other major commissions.
The choice of 81 events across 27 panels makes the Hastings work a history book as much as a picture: nine centuries of British history compressed into scenes a viewer can read while walking its length. That narrative ambition — embroidery as national chronicle — is the direct inheritance of Bayeux, whose makers proved a stitched cloth could argue a version of history at monumental length. The Hastings panels update the argument's scope, from one conquest to a whole island story, while keeping the older work's method of appliquéd and couched cloth.
It consists of 27 panels, each 9 by 3 feet — a total run of more than 240 feet of embroidery — showing 81 great events in British history, made to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
It was commissioned by Group Captain Ralph Ward and made by the Royal School of Needlework in 1965. Twenty-two embroiderers took 10 months to finish it.
It is worked in appliqué by hand, with the addition of couched threads and cords, tweed from Scotland, fabrics from the Victoria and Albert Museum, and feathers from London Zoo — a deliberate mixture of applied materials suited to appliqué at a monumental scale.