The Bayeux Tapestry: British Museum in the lead to host relic in historic deal

The British Museum is in pole position to become the temporary home of the Bayeux Tapestry once a deal is hammered out to bring the huge 11th-century embroidery to the UK.

France’s President Macron is expected to announce the loan of the work, which depicts the Norman conquest of 1066, during his meeting with the Prime Minister tomorrow and the Standard understands the museum is the preferred location.

Its director Hartwig Fischer said the proposed loan would be “probably the most significant ever from France to the UK”. He added: “This is a gesture of extraordinary generosity and is proof of the deep ties that link our countries. The Bayeux Tapestry is of huge historical and current importance, as it recounts one of the most important moments in British and French history, 1066.

“We would be honoured and delighted to display it ... here it would be seen by the widest UK and international audience.” The museum is well placed to cope with the huge visitor numbers the tapestry would generate, with hundreds of thousands of people regularly pouring through its doors for blockbuster shows.

It also has recent experience of high-profile loans, having sent a section of the Elgin Marbles to the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg in 2014.

Dr Michael Lewis, the British Museum’s head of portable antiquities and treasure, said improvements in technology meant any “nervousness” about moving the 230ft-long work across the Channel could be put aside.He said: “It is an amazing piece of work and an amazing story and I’m sure any exhibition here in the UK would be extremely popular.

“About half the visitors to see the tapestry in Normandy are from the UK. It is something people see snippets of but there is a lot of it people will not be familiar with. This is a great opportunity.”

Historian Dan Snow said the tapestry was almost certainly made in England and added: “It’s coming home.” It last left Normandy to be put on display briefly at the Louvre in 1944.

Tory MP Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, urged the museum to lend the Rosetta Stone to the Louvre in return for the tapestry. Carved in 196BC, it was key to deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Found by French soldiers in 1799, it was seized by the British after the Battle of the Nile in 1801, along with Cleopatra’s Needle, now on the Embankment.