Move over Kim Kardashian, with your cover shots for Paper magazine. Same for you, Taylor Swift, with tickets for your Eras tour. For there’s a new phenomenon breaking the internet – with sales appearing to rival the speed of Glastonbury – and it’s not so much viral as venerable.
When I made a note in my diary for 10 a.m. on 1 July to get tickets for the Bayeux Tapestry display at the British Museum, little did I imagine just how difficult it might be. Prompted by my younger daughter’s project on the Norman Conquest, and its commission by Bishop Odo, William the Conqueror’s half-brother, I promised her we’d go and see it in the autumn when it came to London – its first trip to these shores since it was taken to France late in the 11th century.
I blithely logged on around an hour or so after the tickets went on sale – only to find I was 53,327th in the queue. Realising that this would take a hell of a lot longer than the vague, estimated waiting time of ‘more than an hour’, I availed myself of the option to get an email alert when my turn eventually came around. That would, of course, coincide with taxiing my daughter from school to swimming some seven hours later. So I gamely had another crack when I got home – only to find I was even further from my goal. And when I found time the following morning to try yet again, the first tranche of tickets for September to December 2026 had sold out – in just over 24 hours, already generating £2.5 million for the British Museum.
Capacity varies each day, as some days have longer opening hours than others, but surely not since the fabled Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition in 1972-3 – still the most successful British exhibition of all time with just shy of 1.7 million visitors – will the host have seen such demand? Indeed, the number of projected visitors – 7.5 million according to George Osborne, chair of trustees of the British Museum – would dwarf that figure, and translate into £8.6 million for the British Museum. Insured for £800 million against damage or loss during its visit, the loan is part of an exchange whereby the French will get certain artefacts from the UK, including treasures from Sutton Hoo and the Lewis Chessmen.
Friends had resorted to all manner of tricks to get a ticket – logging on from multiple devices using different email addresses; employing ageing parents to sit at their laptops for the day; taking out membership of the British Museum to leapfrog the queue (even these tickets have now gone). Hell, I even know of one desperate soul who approached The Spectator with an idea for a piece on the Bayeux Tapestry breaking the internet in the hope of wrangling a press ticket.
But when the frustration had passed, and when my daughter’s disappointment had been alleviated by the fact her best friend’s mother had been similarly thwarted, I found myself full of questions, not least: who on earth are all these people with an interest in 70m of 1000-year old textiles? (My mother is certainly not among their number; when asked if she’d like to join us if I managed to get a ticket, replied that she thought she’d find it extremely boring, so no thank you.)
I blithely logged on around an hour or so after the tickets went on sale – only to find I was 53,327th in the queue
And indeed, my mother-in-law was quick to point out that we could simply jump on the Elizabeth Line and head to the Reading Museum, which is home to the world’s only full-size replica of the Bayeux Tapestry. Apparently you wouldn’t notice the difference, except for the blue borders, and the more vivid colours due to the availability of more advance dyes when this was stitched by the Leek Embroidery Society back in 1886. Oh that, and the addition of pants. This Victorian modesty was born not of prudishness on behalf of the embroiderers, but rather paternalism on the part of men working at what was the South Kensington Museum and is now the V&A, who altered the photographs being sent to the Leek Embroidery Society to cover up the 93 penises and remove the equine appendages.
As I began to reflect on my thwarted mission, I realised that this is really very heartening. In an age when we’re all, to a greater or lesser extent, obsessed with information updates in real-time, while at the same time berating our youth for their screen addictions (which we’ve failed to control), the idea that thousands of of Brits are prepared to break the internet to get hold of tickets to see the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum should delight us all. Sure, some of the tickets will have been ordered by school groups, and many parents will be dragging entirely uninterested offspring along. But such demand for a near-contemporaneous record of an event which changed the course of British history is truly wonderful.
So, I shall try again to book when more tickets are released in the autumn for 2027. But should I fail again, there’s always Reading, or even a day trip to Normandy when the Tapestry returns to what will be the renovated Bayeux Museum in just over a year’s time.
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