The Bayeux Tapestry and the 8 most important historical artefacts you can see in London right now
Eons of history, just a tube ride away
One of the most important artefacts in British history is now available to view in London, but securing tickets to see the Bayeux Tapestry is proving tricky. Thankfully, there are plenty of amazing alternatives.
The 1,000-year-old Bayeux Tapestry is currently on loan from France to The British Museum until 11th July, but the initial run of 100,000 tickets turned out to be heavily oversubscribed. Another batch of tickets will be dropping on 21st October, but these are for dates in the New Year, and are likely to be similarly challenging to procure.
It’s no great mystery as to why this might be the case. We’re talking about a 70-metre-long piece of embroidered cloth, portraying the lead up to the hugely consequential Norman Conquest of 1066, which has had to be housed in a bespoke case.
What’s more, the tapestry can only be exposed to a certain number of hours of light in any day in order to preserve the delicate material.
In other words, the Bayeux Tapestry’s trip to London was always going to be popular, and access was always going to be limited.
Still, there’s a fair chance that this is going to scupper the plans of many hoping to visit London for a spot of culture over the coming months. It’s a good job our beautiful capital isn’t short of priceless relics, which have been curated and presented for your perusal.
Here are eight important historical artefacts that you can see in London right now.
1. The Rosetta Stone
The British Museum is a literal treasure trove of important artefacts, even without the Bayeux Tapestry. Perhaps the most venerated of all is The Rosetta Stone, a 2,200-year-old fragment of a slab that proved crucial to the initial translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics in the early 19th century. It’s only a partial text, taken from a fairly dry official decree about Ptolemy V, but the key here is that it’s inscribed in three separate scripts – hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Ancient Greek – which enabled scholars to finally crack the code.
- Where to see it: The British Museum
2. The Crown Jewels
If you were to assemble a list of old London tourism cliches, then a mention of the Tower of London, the precious baubles housed within, and the tall-hatted guards commissioned to protect them would probably all feature somewhere near the top. It’s easy to take these things for granted, but The Crown Jewels are well worth seeing at least once in your life. They take the form of a collection of 140 royal ceremonial objects, inlaid with some 23,000 precious stones. These include the crown, orb and sceptre used in British royal coronations.
- Where to see them: The Tower of London
3. The Coffin of Ramses II
Head over to the iconic Battersea Power Station, dodge the obnoxious nouveau riche residents, and ignore the more soulless aspects of the project’s multi-billion-dollar revamp, and you can catch a genuinely world class exhibition. At the heart of the 180 assembled ancient Egyptian artefacts sits the 3,000-year-old coffin of Ramses II, arguably the greatest (and certainly the most self-aggrandising) pharaoh of them all. These artefacts are on loan from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and have never been seen in the UK before, so this is a rare opportunity.
- Where to see it: Ramses and the Pharaohs' Gold exhibition, Battersea
4. The Abraham Tapestries
If you’re specifically in the market for a big old tapestry (how very specific of you) then head on down to Hampton Court Palace in Richmond. There you’ll find ten of the suckers, all hanging on the wall of the Great Hall. This is probably exactly where they were always intended to live, given that they were commissioned by Henry VIII around 1540. True, that means these tapestries are ‘only’ 500 years old, but they stretch out an impressive 84 metres in total, and they offer a remarkable depiction of the life and deeds of the fabled Bible prophet.
- Where to see them: Hampton Court Palace
5. The Tarkhan Dress
I’ll see your 1,000-year-old length of cloth and raise you a 5,000-year-old linen garment. The Tarkhan Dress is thought to be the oldest surviving piece of woven clothing in the world, and you can view it for free at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archeology on the UCL campus. The garment was excavated south of Cairo in 1913, but was only discovered among a larger pile of linen in 1977, when the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Textile Conservation Workshop was commissioned to clean it all up.
- Where to see it: Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archeology
6. Cleopatra’s Needle
One of the oldest and grandest artefacts in London is free to see at any time. Cleopatra’s Needle is right there on the Embankment, with thousands of commuters and visitors marching past it every day – possibly quite oblivious as to its history. This is no replica, but rather a genuine 3,500-year-old Egyptian obelisk, made for Pharaoh Thotmes III. The story of how it came to rest by the Thames in 1878 is an epic story in itself, involving a traumatic voyage in a specially designed ship called – you guessed it – the Cleopatra.
- Where to see it: London WC2N, 6NU (near Embankment station)
7. Bloomberg Tablets
The London Mithraeum is built around a restored third-century Roman temple situated in the basement of Bloomberg Europe’s headquarters. Around 14,000 objects were dug up between 2012 and 2014, and around 600 of those are on display here. Among them are the Bloomberg tablets – a collection of some 405 wooden writing slates that were discovered underneath London’s gleaming financial district. They’re the oldest written documents found in Britain, dating as far back as 50 AD, which places their writing to some time soon after London’s establishment as a Roman settlement.
- Where to see them: London Mithraeum
8. Parthenon Sculptures
These Ancient Greek sculptures have been central to a heated debate over the continued postcolonial ownership of historical artefacts. They were removed from Ottoman-ruled Greece by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, in the early 19th century, earning them the informal name of the Elgin Marbles. For now, you can check out the Parthenon Sculptures in the very same building as the Bayeux Tapestry, in Room 18 of The British Museum. These impressive Ancient Greek sculptures were carved 2,500 years ago, and would once have adorned a temple on the Athenian Acropolis.
- Where to see them: The British Museum
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