The Chester Tapestry

From the outside, Chester Town Hall has an imposing grandeur, built in sandstone in a symmetrical, Gothic revival style in the 1860s. Step inside, where a grand staircase leads to the assembly rooms and former magistrates courts, and you’re arrested by a sight that is far more quirky, colourful and playful.

Installed between November 1979 and July 1980, the Chester Tapestry is a series of embroidered panels that carpet the walls of the entrance foyer in a bold palette of bright pink, red, white, black and gold. The largest panel, measuring more than 7 feet tall and 21 feet wide, is a stylised collage of images representing ‘Chester Today’. It’s dominated by Chester’s architecture, from fragments of Roman ruins to the walls that encircle the city and the cathedral turrets. At the centre is medieval landmark the High Cross; at the time the tapestry was designed, the cross had recently been restored and returned to its original site at the junction of four roads behind the town hall. What’s striking is the way the historic city is represented alongside the modern. The picture is brought up to date by vertical lines suggesting concrete multi-storey carparks and the upward thrust of Addleshaw Tower, completed in 1975 to rehouse the cathedral bells. These built features of the cityscape are animated by other aspects of Chester life and culture, from the streamlined figures of jockeys speeding along the track at Chester racecourse, to Jubilee, an elephant born at Chester zoo in 1977.

Above the main panel is a smaller frieze homing in on details of the city’s famous black and white buildings, including the Rows – covered, double-level rows of shops that form a distinctive feature of the central shopping centre – and timber-framed houses. The city’s gates – which provided entry points through the city walls – are the subject of a frieze above the war memorial. The friezes on the opposite walls look outwards to the surrounding rural area. The facing wall shows herds of Friesian cows, in reference to local speciality Cheshire cheese. The final frieze, adjacent to the staircase, is inspired by views of the River Dee from above, depicting its flow through the countryside as well as the patterns of neighbouring fields, acknowledging the changes to city and county boundaries that took place in the early 1970s.

The Chester Tapestry was the brainchild of Dorothy Colley of Chester Arts Centre and commissioned by Chester Arts and Recreation Trust in 1975 as part of Architectural Heritage Year, to celebrate 1,900 years of the city. The renowned textile designer, writer and lecturer Diana Springall, who later undertook significant commissions for Sheffield University as well as ecclesiastical and commercial settings, was chosen to design the artwork. It was then stitched collaboratively by hundreds of local women aged between 11 and 85, as part of a giant community art project. Although the use of the word ‘tapestry’ attracted controversy (‘embroidered canvas panels’ would be more accurate), the name stuck as it was considered to be in the spirit of the Bayeux Tapestry in Normandy, which Colley had seen many years earlier.

Springall was given a choice of sites, including medieval Gamul House, but felt that the spaces of the town hall provided a natural setting. Speaking in a BBC2 programme on embroidery, broadcast in 1980, she recalled that the building had not been cleaned or decorated, explaining: ‘The Town Hall seemed to cry out for some kind of diversification and softening and perhaps decorative quality.’

Travelling from her home in a converted Kentish oast house, Springall undertook extensive reading and consulted different groups in the city about what the artwork should depict. Spending hours walking around Chester, immersing herself in its atmosphere, she identified that the predominant colour came from its pink sandstone. However, she soon realised that subtle shades would be lost in the darkness of the building, and the design needed to stand up the ‘very powerful architectural setting’. She recalled: ‘One evening, late, walking down by Water Gate, the single scarlet traffic light shone out and I rushed back, took the scarlet into the town hall and realised that unless I went as bright as that it simply wasn’t going to work.’

The design was divided into strips and colour charts were created for reference. Natural linen panels, imported from Germany, were distributed to participants, who attended evening classes to learn the stitches. Larger panels were worked on at Chester Arts Centre or in venues such as village halls by groups of up to eight, including members of Chester Friendship Circle, the Trefoil Guild, Girl Guides and the Women’s Institute. Schoolgirls worked in their lunchbreaks and before school and individuals worked on smaller panels in their own homes.

The work was laborious; each square inch contained 144 stitches, taking an hour to complete. Large areas of colour used velvet stitch in heavy-duty Wilton’s carpet wool; the pink wool was dyed especially. Once completed, each loop was clipped to reveal the fine black outlines of the design (which was created using tent stitch). The majority of this repetitive task was done by a local chiropodist, using one of her specialist tools, as she watched TV. The edges were then sculpted using a technique known as chamfering, giving the embroidery its 3D effect.

Although the vivid pink colour scheme was initially met with horror, and some people refused to work on the tapestry when they first saw the design, it quickly became a focal point for community life. Many friendships were forged over the canvases, over the course of several years, including in outlying villages which had been changed by large areas of new housing development, where women may not otherwise have had chance to meet.

More than forty years on, the Chester Tapestry is still a vibrant modern intervention into an otherwise solemn nineteenth-century municipal building. It is both a lasting legacy of friendships and communities and a portrait of the city in the mid-1970s, a time of modernisation and change.

The Chester Tapestry

From the outside, Chester Town Hall has an imposing grandeur, built in sandstone in a symmetrical, Gothic revival style in the 1860s. Step inside, where a grand staircase leads to the assembly rooms and former magistrates courts, and you’re arrested by a sight that is far more quirky, colourful and playful.

Installed between November 1979 and July 1980, the Chester Tapestry is a series of embroidered panels that carpet the walls of the entrance foyer in a bold palette of bright pink, red, white, black and gold. The largest panel, measuring more than 7 feet tall and 21 feet wide, is a stylised collage of images representing ‘Chester Today’. It’s dominated by Chester’s architecture, from fragments of Roman ruins to the walls that encircle the city and the cathedral turrets. At the centre is medieval landmark the High Cross; at the time the tapestry was designed, the cross had recently been restored and returned to its original site at the junction of four roads behind the town hall. What’s striking is the way the historic city is represented alongside the modern. The picture is brought up to date by vertical lines suggesting concrete multi-storey carparks and the upward thrust of Addleshaw Tower, completed in 1975 to rehouse the cathedral bells. These built features of the cityscape are animated by other aspects of Chester life and culture, from the streamlined figures of jockeys speeding along the track at Chester racecourse, to Jubilee, an elephant born at Chester zoo in 1977.

Above the main panel is a smaller frieze homing in on details of the city’s famous black and white buildings, including the Rows – covered, double-level rows of shops that form a distinctive feature of the central shopping centre – and timber-framed houses. The city’s gates – which provided entry points through the city walls – are the subject of a frieze above the war memorial. The friezes on the opposite walls look outwards to the surrounding rural area. The facing wall shows herds of Friesian cows, in reference to local speciality Cheshire cheese. The final frieze, adjacent to the staircase, is inspired by views of the River Dee from above, depicting its flow through the countryside as well as the patterns of neighbouring fields, acknowledging the changes to city and county boundaries that took place in the early 1970s.

The Chester Tapestry was the brainchild of Dorothy Colley of Chester Arts Centre and commissioned by Chester Arts and Recreation Trust in 1975 as part of Architectural Heritage Year, to celebrate 1,900 years of the city. The renowned textile designer, writer and lecturer Diana Springall, who later undertook significant commissions for Sheffield University as well as ecclesiastical and commercial settings, was chosen to design the artwork. It was then stitched collaboratively by hundreds of local women aged between 11 and 85, as part of a giant community art project. Although the use of the word ‘tapestry’ attracted controversy (‘embroidered canvas panels’ would be more accurate), the name stuck as it was considered to be in the spirit of the Bayeux Tapestry in Normandy, which Colley had seen many years earlier.

Springall was given a choice of sites, including medieval Gamul House, but felt that the spaces of the town hall provided a natural setting. Speaking in a BBC2 programme on embroidery, broadcast in 1980, she recalled that the building had not been cleaned or decorated, explaining: ‘The Town Hall seemed to cry out for some kind of diversification and softening and perhaps decorative quality.’

Travelling from her home in a converted Kentish oast house, Springall undertook extensive reading and consulted different groups in the city about what the artwork should depict. Spending hours walking around Chester, immersing herself in its atmosphere, she identified that the predominant colour came from its pink sandstone. However, she soon realised that subtle shades would be lost in the darkness of the building, and the design needed to stand up the ‘very powerful architectural setting’. She recalled: ‘One evening, late, walking down by Water Gate, the single scarlet traffic light shone out and I rushed back, took the scarlet into the town hall and realised that unless I went as bright as that it simply wasn’t going to work.’

The design was divided into strips and colour charts were created for reference. Natural linen panels, imported from Germany, were distributed to participants, who attended evening classes to learn the stitches. Larger panels were worked on at Chester Arts Centre or in venues such as village halls by groups of up to eight, including members of Chester Friendship Circle, the Trefoil Guild, Girl Guides and the Women’s Institute. Schoolgirls worked in their lunchbreaks and before school and individuals worked on smaller panels in their own homes.

The work was laborious; each square inch contained 144 stitches, taking an hour to complete. Large areas of colour used velvet stitch in heavy-duty Wilton’s carpet wool; the pink wool was dyed especially. Once completed, each loop was clipped to reveal the fine black outlines of the design (which was created using tent stitch). The majority of this repetitive task was done by a local chiropodist, using one of her specialist tools, as she watched TV. The edges were then sculpted using a technique known as chamfering, giving the embroidery its 3D effect.

Although the vivid pink colour scheme was initially met with horror, and some people refused to work on the tapestry when they first saw the design, it quickly became a focal point for community life. Many friendships were forged over the canvases, over the course of several years, including in outlying villages which had been changed by large areas of new housing development, where women may not otherwise have had chance to meet.

More than forty years on, the Chester Tapestry is still a vibrant modern intervention into an otherwise solemn nineteenth-century municipal building. It is both a lasting legacy of friendships and communities and a portrait of the city in the mid-1970s, a time of modernisation and change.