The hottest ticket in town is for the Bayeux Tapestry, which goes on display to the public today at the British Museum. It's so hot that the rest of 2026 is fully sold out and January-March 2027 is expected to go the same way when bookings reopen next month.
But if you can't wait, or if you baulk at paying £33 for a once-in-a-lifetime blockbuster, an alternative opportunity to view the tapestry exists. It's a full-size full-colour fully-embroidered copy of the original and entirely free to view. To view it all you need to do is go to Reading, make your way to Reading Museum and head upstairs.
Most local museums feature local stuff like clay pots, agricultural tools and something that used to hang outside a pub. Reading Museum has all of this just inside the entrance, also a painting normally held in storage and a table where a nice lady will invite you to handle a fossil. But take the back stairs (or alternatively the lift, assuming they've got it working again) and the most famous Anglo-French strip cartoon awaits your perusal.
It's 70 metres long and stretches all around the first floor mezzanine as part of a specially-designed Bayeux Gallery opened in 1992. It's been divided into three sections, the first of which curls around a square landing above the museum entrance. This follows the story as far as Edward the Confessor's funeral, then restarts across the landing above the Story of Reading Gallery. Take your time, there's no queue of paid visitors shuffling behind you here, you're free to enjoy this at your own pace.
The reason why Reading has a replica Bayeux Tapestry is all thanks to Elizabeth Wardle, a Staffordshire sewer who in 1885 travelled to see the original in Normandy. On returning she cajoled 35 members of the Leek Embroidery Society into stitching a full-size copy, having got her husband to dye threads to match the original eight colours. The replica was complete by Whitsun 1886, after which it was toured round England and also shown in Germany and the USA. It happened to be in Reading in 1895 when the Society decided to sell it, thus an alderman bought it for £300 and gave it to the town. It's still here.
Just as you'd currently see in Bloomsbury, the first panel depicts Edward the Confessor despatching Earl Harold to France. The colours are rather brighter in Reading and the background fabric isn't stained, but this particular copy hasn't been stashed in a cathedral storeroom, transported on a cattle truck or hidden from the Nazis. What you also get at both places is a simple explanation of the story unfolding scene by scene - here it's text on a green panel below, at the British Museum it's silent video narration on a screen behind.
In an early example of apposite marketing the green panel is sponsored by Norman Insurance, a local company who in 1992 were headquartered by the river. Alas their sponsorship has lasted far longer than the company as they were soon absorbed into a larger company who have themselves been rebranded. Meanwhile the display cases are courtesy of pharmaceutical giant Bayer who are still a significant player in the town, and excellently all the glass is slightly slanted which means every photo comes out with no annoying reflections.
The tapestry takes its time to tell the early part of the story. Harold sets off on a lengthy trek to Bosham and thence across the Channel to land near Beauvais. In lengthy shenanigans he gets captured, gains William's favour by assisting with a battle in Brittany and everyone carries a lot of hawks. Only after Harold has sworn an oath to William is he allowed back across the Channel, and I'm sorry if any of this is spoilers for those of you with British Museum tickets but you should have paid more attention in history lessons.
The narrative plays out impressively clearly, such was the skill of those who originally composed it. The central strip has key tableaux which often merge at the edges, say with soldiers marching from one event to the next. Only a few words are used, and you don't always have to have learned Latin to get the gist. Separate borders top and bottom feature supporting characters, often animals in the early stages but piled high with bloodied corpses by the finale.
One of the strangest scenes depicts a sexual scandal seemingly with no connection to the main plot, well known in the 11th century but which historians can no longer identify. One man in the lower border appears full frontal, contributing to a total of almost 100 willies (human and equine) depicted in the original tapestry. The ladies who stitched this Victorian facsimile chose to give him a pair of shorts to avoid scandalising their audience, but rest assured the explanatory panel underneath shows the original design with everything hanging out.
A nice touch in the Reading tapestry is that each of the embroiderers has sewn their name underneath the panels they were responsible for. Thus the opening scene is "Elizabeth Wardle's work", right up to the point where it says "ends here", whereas Harold being seized in Normandy is by "Mabel Challoner, her work" and William riding into battle is "the work of Anne Smith". By contrast we know nothing of the original embroiderers from Canterbury, nor how many of them there were nor how long they took.
Part two kicks off with Harold taking the English throne, the none too subtle subtext being that he should instead have kowtowed to William. History is told by the victors so everything here is attempting to validate William's claims, indeed the entire 70 metres is essentially a massive piece of Norman propaganda. This is also famously where Halley's Comet appears in the sky, a blazing portent of doom and also quite possibly the best known example of 11th century graphic representation.
On we walk round the balcony as William slowly gathers an army and builds the boats to sail them in. The final scene before the battle includes the only child depicted in the tapestry, also one of just three women, both of whom are fleeing a burning building. And then it's all swords and arrows and shields and lances and knights on horseback, both sides charging towards each other and falling in great numbers, right up to the famous scene where someone gets an arrow in the eye. Hic Harold Rex Interfectus Est.
The final scene in the existing Bayeux Tapestry is of the remaining English troops fleeing the battlefield. We know there used to be a follow-up panel but it was lost centuries back and nobody knows for sure what it contained. The Reading version thus has one-up on the British Museum because it displays a potential finale in a separate frame at the top of the stairs. This was sewn by embroiderer Joy Messent in 2019 and depicts the surrender of the English nobles at Berkhamsted followed by William's coronation in Westminster Abbey. It's not a happy ending, not viewed from this side of the Channel, but it helped create the country that patriots now defend with pride.
If what you want is top needlework and a rollicking story, Reading's Bayeux Tapestry certainly delivers. Admittedly it's not got the 950-year-old frisson of the original which was sewn by ladies for whom this was recent blockbuster news rather than a mere reproductive exercise. But it was here in Reading on free display long before the genuine article arrived on these shores and will still be here long after it's gone. Authenticity aside, it really is almost as good as viewing the real thing.
» Reading Museum is open Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-4pm, admission free (but do check for gallery closures before you visit because they get a lot of school groups)
» Ian reviews the Reading version:"It may lack the miasma of history that comes from an authentic relic, but it’s so well made that you can almost forget it’s a replica and still bask in the monumental day that changed England forever."
» Ian reviews the genuine version:"If you have tickets, this once-in-a-lifetime moment will be a pure experience that hits in a way that I don’t think any exhibition I have ever been to could come close to."
