Artifact Lands in British Museum 'Like a Heist Movie in Reverse'

After almost 1,000 years, the Bayeux Tapestry is back on English soil. In scenes like a heist movie in reverse, the priceless medieval artwork was spirited into the British Museum early Friday in the dead of night, after a high-tech, tight-security operation where any slipup could've spelled disaster, reports the AP. On loan from its home in France, the tapestry will go on display at the London museum from Sept. 10 until July 2027. It's a public homecoming for a vivid visual record of the 1066 Norman invasion, the last successful conquest of England. The tapestry's arrival in London has been widely anticipated, but due to security concerns, all details of when and how it would arrive were kept under wraps.

"It's the first time in 1,000 years that such an important piece of British—French, too—history is going to be on these shores," said British Museum chief Nicholas Cullinan said as he waited outside the museum in the dark. "It's incredibly exciting." The 230-foot tapestry was folded accordion-style in a climate-controlled case that was placed inside a shock-absorbing cradle. That went into a truck that crossed from France on a vehicle shuttle train through the Channel Tunnel. After an 11-hour, 350-mile trip, escorted by police, the truck backed slowly into a loading bay at the museum, where workers gingerly eased the container, the size of a small car, to the ground. Museum staff and British and French diplomats who'd been watching in silence broke into applause.

The priceless cargo—which features more than 620 people and 737 animals and tells its story in 58 scenes brimming with vivid and sometimes gory detail—will spend several days acclimatizing before it's carefully unpacked and unfolded for an exhibition that the museum expects to be one of the most popular in its 267-year history. Some 100,000 tickets were sold in their first day on sale this month. "It was like trying to get tickets to [the] Glastonbury [Festival]," Cullinan said. "I don't take for granted that people care that much about a 1,000-year-old embroidery. I think that's an amazing thing." In return, the British Museum will loan treasures from the Sutton Hoo hoard—artifacts from a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon ship burial—and other items to museums in Normandy. More here.