The Bayeux Tapestry Is Now on Show at the British Museum, but Photography Is Forbidden

The seventy-metre eleventh-century embroidery of the Norman conquest of England has arrived in London for the first time in almost a thousand years. France has lent it to the British Museum under an intergovernmental agreement for the period from September 2026 to July 2027, while the museum in Bayeux undergoes reconstruction. The British government has insured the monument for roughly £800 million. In return, the British Museum is sending the Sutton Hoo treasures and the Lewis Chessmen to France. Tickets are sold out until the end of December.

On the second day of the exhibition, the museum banned photography. The likely reason has to do with viewing time. Owing to its fragility, the embroidery can no longer be hung vertically and has therefore been laid out horizontally, and each visitor is allotted forty minutes to walk along it. If people stop to take pictures, the flow of visitors through the museum may suffer badly.

At the same time, the conservators have reported two new small tears, a few millimetres long each, discovered during a condition check after the tapestry's arrival in England. A museum spokesman explained that the report compares the state of the embroidery in July 2026 with photographs taken in September 2025, before it was taken off display in Bayeux.