The Bayeux Tapestry has arrived on the British Museum in London, returning to England for the primary time in nearly 1000 years forward of its show this autumn. At roughly 6am on Friday, 10 July, the museum director Nicholas Cullinan wrote on Instagram: “The Bayeux Tapestry has arrived @britishmuseum, the primary time it has travelled throughout the Channel because it was made within the 1070s.”
Based on the BBC, the tapestry was pushed right into a loading bay on the museum round 2.50am in entrance of chosen friends together with the French ambassador to the UK, Hélène Tréheux-Duchêne. The 70m tapestry was faraway from a secret location in northern France and transported by lorry by the Channel Tunnel on a 350 mile journey reportedly lasting 11 hours.
The BBC stories that the folding stand, which the tapestry has been saved on because it was taken down from show on the Bayeux Tapestry Museum in Normandy final 12 months, was put inside a crate, with temperature and humidity regulation.
The crate was then positioned into an outer cage fitted with steel springs which acted as shock absorbers, defending the embroidery from bumps within the street and allaying fears about transporting such a fragile object. The Metropolitan Police Service and Kent Police transported the eleventh century work safely from Folkestone to London in a single day, in response to a museum assertion.
The Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts the 1066 Norman invasion and the Battle of Hastings, will likely be displayed within the Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery from 10 September till July 2027, whereas the Bayeux Tapestry Museum undergoes renovations. The tapestry will likely be proven horizontally for the primary time within the British Museum show.
The tapestry is owned by the French state, not the Bayeux establishment, so the mortgage has been negotiated with the federal government. In an op-ed for Le Monde, Cullinan wrote that, “for practically a millennium, France has cared for one of many world’s biggest historic treasures.”
“Now, for the primary time, France has chosen to let it cross the Channel. Museum loans are frequent. This isn’t. To entrust one other nation with one in every of your most cherished cultural treasures is an act that reaches past diplomacy. It’s a gesture of confidence, of friendship and, above all, of belief,” he added.
The museum thanked France for the unprecedented mortgage with a projection on Dover’s well-known white cliffs
© The Trustees of the British Museum
The museum additionally projected a picture of the tapestry on to the white cliffs of Dover, dealing with France throughout the Channel, with the phrase merci (thanks). In the meantime President Emmanuel Macron wrote in The Occasions that “our two nations are usually not merely lending one another artworks: they’re sharing the nice narratives of European historical past’s origins.”
Ticket gross sales for the exhibition generated over £2.5m on the primary day, marking the “single largest day of ticket gross sales in its historical past”, in response to a museum assertion.
