At precisely 02:50 on a moonlit morning, a lorry slipped quietly into the loading bay of the British Museum, carrying inside its aluminium-framed crate one of the most consequential works of art that Europe has ever produced. The Bayeux Tapestry — all seventy metres of it, stitched by hands that may well have trembled with the memory of actual battle — had just crossed the Channel from a secret location in northern France, chaperoned by a police escort and trailed by the quiet weight of almost a thousand years of history. For the small crowd gathered to receive it — among them the French ambassador to the United Kingdom and the museum's own director — the arrival of a black box from the back of a lorry was, improbably, a moment of barely contained emotion. The embroidery, which unfolds across fifty-eight scenes the events leading to the Norman Conquest of 1066, has not been seen on English soil since it is believed to have been created here.

It has been exhibited in the Norman city of Bayeux since 1983, but its home museum is now closed for renovation, and the nine-month loan — finalised between French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer — offered a rare and unrepeatable window. Macron marked the occasion by projecting an image of the tapestry onto the white cliffs of Dover, inscribed simply with the words: merci beaucoup. Nick Cullinan, the British Museum's director, described what he had witnessed as "a really remarkable thing not just to witness but to be part of." Millie Horton-Insch, the exhibition's project curator, admitted she had welled up watching the crate descend from the lorry — and confessed she expected to be, in her own words, "in floods of tears" when she finally sees the object itself.