While the British Museum queues for Bayeux, Reading offers space to breathe: a full-scale Victorian version, Norman ruins, plus grand rooms and a surprisingly serious restaurant at The Roseate Reading.
asserted
Reading → queue → Reading
The British Museum, currently showing the original embroidery on its historic loan from France, would be another, assuming one is prepared to participate in what one visitor recently described as “Glastonbury for the over-60s”.
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visitor → show → over-60s
Three or four minutes on foot from The Roseate Reading, inside the gloriously municipal Reading Museum, is Britain’s Victorian Bayeux Tapestry: roughly 70 metres of the surviving story, recreated at full scale.
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Tapestry → survive → scale
No scrum around Harold’s eye; no stranger’s shoulder advancing inexorably into your field of vision just as William lands at Pevensey.
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William → advance → Pevensey
Before taking my daughter, Lyra, I described the Bayeux Tapestry as an eleventh-century graphic novel: kings, battles, ships, horses, feasts, omens and propaganda, frame-by-frame.
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I → take → frame
It looked, she said, like a badly drawn comic crossed with an old lady’s knitting club.
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she → look → club
The longer one stands before it, though, the stranger and more accomplished it becomes.
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it → stand → it
Reading’s version is not, strictly speaking, identical to the original.
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version → speak → original
It may preserve details since faded from its medieval ancestor; elsewhere the Victorians introduced their own morality (more on that later).
uncertain
Victorians → preserve → that
But as a chance to get extremely close to one of Europe’s most consequential pieces of visual storytelling, without being hurried along, Reading has been hiding a cultural cheat code in plain sight.
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Reading → get → sight
The copy exists because Elizabeth Wardle, an accomplished embroiderer from Leek, decided England should have a Bayeux Tapestry of its own.
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England → exist → own
After seeing the original in 1885, she recruited 35 women from across Britain to recreate all 70 metres of it, using her own study and hand-coloured photographs from what is now the V&A.
Her husband, Thomas, a silk dyer and friend of William Morris, supplied the yarns; each embroiderer stitched her name beneath her section.
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embroiderer → see → section
Stand close and one charming truth emerges: some were considerably better at it than others.
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some → stand → others
Finished in just over a year, it toured Britain, Germany and America before reaching Reading in 1895, where former mayor, Arthur Hill bought it for the town.
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Hill → finish → town
This was more historically apposite than it sounds.
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it → sound → ?
William the Conqueror’s youngest son, Henry I, founded Reading Abbey in 1121, then was buried there in 1136.
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son → found → 1136
On our cool, windy walk from the hotel’s red carpet towards the museum, we passed straight through its ruins, enormous enough to make Reading suddenly feel less like somewhere reached by a fast train from Paddington and instead a place sitting rather squarely on top of English history.
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Reading → pass → history
The route has pleasing logic: out of the former Shire Hall, through the abbey of the Conqueror’s son, then into a Victorian recreation of the story which put the family in charge.
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which → have → charge
The tapestry rewards slowness.
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tapestry → reward → slowness
I particularly liked the banquets: convivial, happy, a rare interval in which nobody appears to be invading, betraying or dismembering anyone, before the omens, mobilisation and assorted medieval decapitation resume.
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omens → like → anyone
One naked fellow in the border acquires pants in Reading.
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fellow → acquire → Reading
For years the women of Leek were blamed for the prudery, unfairly; male staff at the South Kensington Museum had already added the underwear to the photographs they copied.
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they → blame → photographs
Though, seeing the figure concerned, I did wonder whether the pants would actually fit.
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pants → see → ?
After a guided tour finished, people flocked in, forgive the pun, and queued at the beginning.
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people → guide → beginning
Yet the embroidery is displayed in two long sections, so starting halfway produced an entirely different experience.
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starting → display → experience
At one point I stood virtually alone before the famous image of Harold apparently taking an arrow through the eye.
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Harold → stand → eye
The original ending is lost.
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ending → lose → ?
On a separate wall Reading offers an imagined final panel, with William enthroned: an answer to a medieval cliffhanger.
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William → offer → cliffhanger
It has acquired a history of its own.
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It → acquire → own
Shire Hall after dark
The Roseate has civic history baked into it.
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Roseate → have → it
Its Grade II-listed main building was constructed between 1904 and 1911 as Berkshire’s Shire Hall in emphatic Queen Anne mode: red brick, Portland stone, Doric columns and a groin-vaulted entrance hall.
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building → list → mode
Berkshire County Council stayed until 1981.
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Council → stay → 1981
The building has strong bones.
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building → have → bones
Purbeck marble, vaulted ceilings, and the original lift shaft survive, although into that shaft someone has suspended an Italian chandelier containing 86,000 beads, approximately the correct number for a former county administration depending on your attitude to local government.
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someone → survive → government
The old council chamber survives too, now the Eden room.
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chamber → survive → ?
Reading Crown Court sits next door.
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Court → sit → ?
One former manager joked that boring through the wall would effectively put him in court, a hazard which may concentrate the mind when settling a hotel bill.
uncertain
which → joke → bill
The former Berkshire Shire Hall has loosened up considerably since 1911.
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Hall → loosen → 1911
Alain Bonnefoit’s reclining nude now watches over the bed, prompting Lyra to stand on the mattress for a closer inspection.
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nude → recline → inspection
Civic administration did not, I suspect, originally involve quite so much buttock.
asserted
I → suspect → buttock
…and 26 more, not listed.
The Aporia
