British Museum to pay £1.2m to move Bayeux Tapestry across Channel

The British Museum is set to pay £1.2million to move the Bayeux Tapestry across the Channel, as the artwork is given its own police escort and VIP ride on the Eurostar. 

The 1,000-year-old embroidery will be transported this year for the first time in 950 years from Bayeux Museum in Bayeux, France, to London - where it will be exhibited from September. 

The 70-metre piece will be put on its own Eurostar train at night travelling through the Channel tunnel, with a test run taking place over the next several weeks to guarantee the fragile priceless artefact is not damaged. 

This follows an array of calls to scrap the plans over concerns of the tapestry's safety, including from artist David Hockney, who described it as 'madness' and claimed it forms part of a 'vanity' project by the British Museum. 

French president Emmanuel Macron announced in July 2025 that the artefact, which depicts the Norman invasion of 1066 by the threading of wool on linen cloth, would be loaned to the UK until July 2027 as part of a cultural exchange.

In exchange, treasures including artefacts from the Anglo-Saxon burial mounds at Sutton Hoo and the 12th-century Lewis chess pieces, will be sent to museums in Normandy, France. 

The loan was first suggested in 2018 between President Macron and then-prime minister Theresa May, yet it didn't come to the fore until last year. 

An internal document from the British Museum described the embroidery 'as the most complex object the museum has ever borrowed...a once in a millennium loan', as reported by The Sunday Times - who obtained it through a Freedom of Information request. 

The piece is currently being stored in a confidential location in France within a specially designed crate, having left the Bayeux Museum in September. 

It will be escorted by French police this summer to Calais, where it will be laid out on a train, which will travel at a speed specifically designed to control vibrations and prevent damage. 

The control over the piece will be officially handed to the British Museum half-way across the English Channel. 

It will then be driven, escorted by Kent Police, from Folkstone to London. 

The tapestry will be delicately removed from its crate at the British Museum and put in a display case, where it will sit in a windowless room to prevent sun damage.

The case has been specifically designed, believed to cost around £600,000, to keep the artefact still and at a micro-climate. 

It will also receive 24-hour monitoring by staff as it lies flat, instead of the U-shape seen in the Bayeux Museum, in the London museum's Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery. 

The exhibition was previously believed to cost £2.6million, The Sunday Times reported, but this has estimated to have sharply risen since last year - as the museum budgets £1.2million to transport the embroidery alone. 

Visitors will be able to view it from a balcony as well as up close.  

Tickets will go on sale on July 1 for the 10-month long exhibition, with ticket prices yet to be finalised - an estimated 750,000 to a million visitors are expected by the museum. 

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Nicholas Cullinan, who has run the British Museum since 2024, told The Sunday Times it will 'definitely be one of the most popular exhibitions that...any museum in this country has ever done'.

He compared it to the British Museum's display of Tutankhamun in 1972, which saw 1.7 million visitors, and its exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors in 2007, which pulled a crowd of 850,000. 

The tapestry is set to be covered by a UK Treasury indemnity of around £800million during the loan, covering the embroidery against damage or loss during its transfer.

The Treasury told the Financial Times that it had 'received an estimated valuation of the Bayeux Tapestry which has been provisionally approved'. 

The paper reported that officials expect the final valuation to be 'around £800million'.

The Treasury did not dispute the figure but declined to comment on the price. 

The Bayeux Museum is currently under renovations, which will be completed when the tapestry returns in September 2027.