UK's delicate deal to get Bayeux Tapestry loaned from France - diplomatic coup or cultural gamble?

When the Bayeux Tapestry goes on show at the British Museum later this year it will be the culmination of one of the most impressive cultural exchanges this century.

Nearly a thousand years old, the tapestry is one of the earliest visual stories in Europe. A medieval graphic novel, if you like, that's shaped how we remember 1066 and how William the Conqueror came from France to become King of England.

And it is big, wider than a football field. The 11th-century masterpiece is being loaned from France and will feature in an exhibition at the British Museum from September.

So forget about Taylor Swift or Oasis - insiders are anticipating a Glastonbury-esque fight to get hold of tickets. "Next year we are expecting 7.5m visitors," George Osborne, chair of the British Museum, tells Sky News.

"That's more than the entire 270-odd year history of the British Museum." The state-to-state loan should, according to the museum's director Nicholas Cullinan, be viewed as an international event which "shows that culture can bring people together". But while it is without question a bit of a diplomatic coup, the decision to move the fragile Norman masterpiece in the first place is a contentious one.

'You don't play with this kind of masterpiece' From 2005 to 2010, Isabelle Attard was the director of the Bayeux Tapestry Museum in France. A former Green party deputy in the French National Assembly, she feels French President Emmanuel Macron's decision to loan the masterpiece is a "joke".

"I am not sure that everybody understands how fragile the tapestry is," she says. "Emmanuel Macron [has] never cared about the advice and the opinion of the people who specialise in textile preservation.

"You just don't play with this kind of masterpiece because it's not replaceable. What surprised me is that curators in the British Museum can just see [the tapestry] like a normal item.

It's not the case." Attard's sentiment is shared by renowned British artist David Hockney who, in an an op-ed for The Independent, said that "some things are too precious to take a risk with.