How British Museum secured chance to host Bayeux Tapestry’s return to UK after 900 years

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The British Museum is to display the Bayeux Tapestry next year in what will be the biggest “blockbuster” exhibition in London for years, in a coup pulled off after weeks of secret high-level diplomacy.

President Emmanuel Macron confirmed the loan at the start of his three-day state visit to Britain — it will involve the British Museum sending treasures from the Sutton Hoo burial ship and the Lewis Chessmen to France.

The 70m 11th-century tapestry depicts events of the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066 and is thought to have been woven in England. It has been displayed in various museums in France throughout its history, but never at a museum in the UK.

The cultural exchange represents a surprise triumph for the British Museum over its London rival, the V&A.

“This will be the blockbuster exhibition of our generation,” said George Osborne, the British Museum’s chair and former Conservative chancellor.

The Bayeux Tapestry will invite parallels with the museum’s famous Tutankhamun exhibition it staged in 1972, but the news came as a blow to the V&A, which thought it was in pole position to host the tapestry.

“Eyebrows were raised,” said one V&A official, claiming Macron had indicated on a visit to London in 2018 during Theresa May’s premiership that the tapestry might be loaned to the South Kensington museum.

The V&A had been leading a conservation partnership with the Bayeux Museum in Normandy, where the tapestry has been housed. “Ultimately it’s good news for UK-France cultural relations,” the official conceded.

Macron, in a speech at Westminster on Tuesday, said of the loan agreement: “It took probably more years to deliver this project than all the Brexit texts. We launched it with Theresa May. But at the end of the day we did it.”

The deal was hatched in May when Rachida Dati, France’s culture minister, told UK culture minister Chris Bryant what France would like in return for the tapestry.

Those briefed on the discussions said Dati made clear that the Sutton Hoo treasures, part of an extraordinary seventh-century Anglo-Saxon ship burial, were France’s principal demand.

The bad news for the V&A, whose director is former Labour MP Tristram Hunt, was that the Sutton Hoo hoard is located in the British Museum. Talks then began in earnest in how to make the swap a reality.

Osborne was brought into the loop along with the British Museum’s director Nicholas Cullinan and it quickly became clear that the institution had the space to display the tapestry and the right climate control to house the delicate work.

The British Museum was also able to offer the loan of the Lewis Chessmen, medieval chess pieces discovered in 1831 on the Isle of Lewis, to museums in France.

The details of the agreement were hammered out so that the announcement would coincide with Macron’s state visit this week. The V&A was kept in the dark.

Lord Peter Ricketts, Britain’s former ambassador to Paris, and Philippe Bélaval, Macron’s cultural adviser, oversaw the detailed preparations.

The Bayeux Tapestry will come to the UK in 2026 with British Museum officials saying they expect the exhibition to last for about a year.

Lisa Nandy, culture secretary, said: “This loan is a symbol of our shared history with our friends in France.” She said the British Museum was “a fitting place to host this most treasured piece of our nation’s history”.

The Bayeux Museum is expected to close at the end of August for two years before the tapestry is moved to a new building in 2027, the 1,000th anniversary of William the Conqueror’s birth.

For Osborne, the ambitious cultural exchange is a template for what he hopes could be a much more controversial loan deal, involving the Parthenon Sculptures, sometimes known as the Elgin Marbles.

Osborne has been in talks with the Greek government about a temporary loan of part of the sculptures, housed in the British Museum, to Athens, in exchange for the loan of Greek treasures never previously seen in Britain.