Michael Lewis

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310 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 8 Sep

Michael Lewis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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HistoryExtra podcast · The Bayeux Tapestry blockbuster at the British Museum · 8 Sep 2026 podcast

But I think we want people to come to this exhibition and realise this is a moment in time, this is a unique opportunity to see the Bayeux Tapestry.

The tapestry itself tells a particular perspective on the past, as you know well, and that's hard to communicate in some ways, but we wanted the tapestry to tell its own story, but also within the exhibition, reflect the fact that it is only one voice of the 11th century amongst those others.

So there's ways that we've tried to do that.

And also, we wanted to make a moment of the fact that the Bayeux Tapestry finishes suddenly.

Now, of course, in some displays or books or whatever, there's a suggestion about, you know, how did the Bayeux Tapestry end?

And it kind of normally talks about the crowning of William the Conqueror on Christmas Day 1066.

But to us, that seemed to miss an opportunity, actually, because in 1066, when the Battle of Hastings had finished,

People did not know William the Conqueror was certainly going to become king.

Of course, the designers of the Bayeux Tapestry did.

But even after that, it wasn't clear that this regime was going to be successful in this country.

And we wanted to use it as an opportunity to reflect upon the lives of people at the time of the conquest and how they would have felt about this event.

But to be honest, there's lots of things that we could have said about the Bayeux Tapestry.

We simply don't have the room or the time to do that.

So from my perspective, the tapestry exhibition is really about introducing people to the Bayeux Tapestry, experiencing the Bayeux Tapestry firsthand, and then hopefully being excited to learn more about the tapestry and this period through other means.

Because we could have, for example, said people can have as much time as they like, we can have loads of more objects, but actually we'd be very, very limited then in terms of the numbers of people that would come and see it.

And if we'd opened an exhibition and said, okay, only 100,000 people can come and see this, I think many hundreds of thousands and millions of people would be really disappointed that they never had the opportunity to see it.

So I think we realised really at the beginning that we had to do this in a very different way than most British Museum exhibitions.

Yes, basically, because the requirement from the French state was that the object had to be flat.

And of course, if it's flat, then it has to be in a single length.

So there was no negotiation about that.

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