The first tranche of tickets for the highly anticipated Bayeux Tapestry exhibition will go on sale from 1 July, the British Museum has announced.

The show will be the first time the tapestry has been displayed in the UK since it was made almost 1,000 years ago. It is expected to be one of the most popular events in the museum’s history, with up to 7.5 million visitors forecast to attend.

General admission tickets to see the artefact will initially be available for dates between September and December 2026.

Two more ticket releases will be made in October this year and January next year, for access from January to March 2027 and April to July 2027 respectively.

The British Museum is reportedly budgeting more than £1.2m to transport the fragile, 70-metre-long tapestry from Normandy to London. The artefact will be insured for around £800m under the UK’s Government Indemnity Scheme.

The museum will be dedicating special opening hours for British schoolchildren to guarantee as much access as possible, and is also planning a national programme alongside the tapestry loan to support those unable to make it to London.

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To mark the ticket announcement, an advertisement was unveiled at Piccadilly Circus this week, where the British Museum’s director Nicholas Cullinan and chair of trustees George Osborne were joined by the French ambassador Hélène Duchêne. 

“The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most important cultural artefacts from the medieval world and has been a source of inspiration and wonder for generations,” said Cullinan. 

“It’s difficult to capture just how extraordinary the opportunity to display the tapestry in the UK for the first time in 1000 years is. I’m glad we’ll now all be able to share in that excitement as people book their tickets and travel to London to take part in what is undoubtedly going to be one of the biggest cultural events the British Museum has hosted – one for the ages.”

Osborne said the exhibition would be a “truly once-in-a-lifetime experience”.

“I hope people mark their calendars and seize the chance to see it when it arrives, in what promises to be an extraordinary moment for the country,” he said.

According to the British Museum, public anticipation to see the tapestry is at an “all-time high”.

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Recent polling carried out for the museum showed that 75% of the public support the partnership with France, and 76% believe that “1066 is an important part of British history and people should learn more about it”.

The polling also showed significant support for increasing awareness of the events of 1066, with 71% of parents saying they want their child to learn more about the story of the tapestry while it is in the UK, and 82% supportive of visits and school trips to the museum to see the artefact.

However there is opposition to the loan from some quarters; the artist David Hockney, who now lives in Normandy, warned last month that the artefact “would be put in jeopardy” if taken to London due to its extreme fragility. “Some things are too precious to take a risk with," the 88-year-old wrote in the Independent last month. “Moving the Bayeux Tapestry is one of them.”

Hockney's view is echoed by many heritage professionals in France, where more than 77,000 people have signed a petition calling for the loan to be halted.

In response, Cullinan has said that “while we understand these concerns, the museum has a world-leading conservation and collections team who are experts at handling and caring for this type of material”.

For security reasons, details of exactly when the tapestry will be brought to London are not being released, but it is reportedly going to be transported on a lorry by road and rail.

Before the loan, a technical team commissioned by the French state will carry out a dry run of the entire travel route using a crate containing a facsimile of the tapestry, equipped with a vibration analysis device.

The team will then work to identify solutions to reduce vibrations to less than two millimetres per second.