LONDON: French President Emmanuel Macron arrives in London on Wednesday to meet new Prime Minister Andy Burnham and visit the Bayeux Tapestry at its temporary home in the British Museum.<\/p>\n
The two leaders and their spouses will join King Charles III and Queen Camilla for a private viewing of the 70-meter tapestry, a 1,000-year-old symbol of Anglo-French relations that depicts the Norman conquest of England in 1066.<\/p>\n
France loaned the embroidery, insured for $1.1 billion, for a 10-month exhibition that opens to the public on Sept. 10. It was spirited from Bayeux in northwest France to London by road and rail in a clandestine high-security operation in July, the first time since the 11th century that it has touched British soil.<\/p>\n
Burnham said the tapestry\u2019s return \u201cis a landmark moment in the history of our two nations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Macron and the king will deliver speeches at a reception in the museum\u2019s Great Court for representatives from Britain and France involved in the loan and schoolchildren from both countries.<\/p>\n
Stitched in wool thread on linen fabric, the artwork depicts events leading up to the Battle of Hastings in October 1066, when William, Duke of Normandy, defeated King Harold\u2019s Anglo-Saxon army. The invasion ended Saxon rule, made William the Conqueror the first Norman king of England, and bound Britain and France together in a close and complicated relationship.<\/p>\n
The loan was announced during Macron\u2019s state visit to the UK in July 2025. In return, the British Museum is lending items including Viking and Anglo-Saxon treasures to museums in Normandy.<\/p>\n
Burnham, who took office six weeks ago, will host Macron for talks at 10 Downing St. on Thursday. Burnham\u2019s office said efforts to stop migrants crossing the Channel in small boats will top the agenda. The UK says stepped-up law enforcement cooperation between the two countries has helped reduce the number of people making the crossing in 2026 by more than 40 percent compared to last year.<\/p>\n
The US-Iran conflict and the Russia-Ukraine war are also likely to feature. France and the UK have led efforts to bolster European support for Ukraine during its more than 4-year war against Russia\u2019s invasion, and Burnham has vowed to maintain British backing for Kyiv.<\/p>\n
The prime minister also wants to forge closer ties with the European Union to end what he has called a \u201cdecade of low growth\u201d caused by Britain\u2019s departure from the now-27-member bloc after a 2016 referendum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LONDON: French President Emmanuel Macron arrives in London on Wednesday to meet new Prime Minister Andy Burnham and visit the Bayeux Tapestry at its temporary home in the British Museum. The two leaders and their spouses will join King Charles III and Queen Camilla for a private viewing of the 70-meter tapestry, a 1,000-year-old symbol …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":102521,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102506"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102522,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102506\/revisions\/102522"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}