British Museum Turns Its Forecourt Into a Woodland Prelude to the Bayeux Tapestry
The British Museum is using trees, planting, and color to prepare visitors for one of its most anticipated loans. Beginning May 16, the museum will present “Tapestry of Trees,” a forecourt installation designed by garden designer Andy Sturgeon to accompany the Bayeux Tapestry before the medieval textile goes on view in September as part of a major exhibition on the Norman Conquest of England.
The display includes 37 silver birch trees, along with grasses and perennials selected to evoke the landscape of East Sussex, where the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. Sturgeon said he wanted to counter the museum’s “vast monochromatic monolith” with something “colorful and uplifting,” adding that the trees appear to reach toward the street entrance “as if beckoning it to enter.”
The planting scheme also draws on the tapestry itself. Across the 230-foot-long work, trees appear 37 times, sometimes as punctuation between scenes and elsewhere as markers of place, from Harold moving through the countryside to Norman scouts surveying a wooded hillside. Some scholars have even argued that the embroidery identifies specific species, including oak, ash, and beech.
The installation is being presented as a prelude to the British Museum’s broader forecourt redevelopment, which is scheduled to open in 2027. That project will convert the front lawn into a Mediterranean-style botanical garden and add permanent Welcome Pavilions intended to improve visitor flow. The design drew criticism from some conservationists, who said it would disrupt the building’s historic symmetry, but it received unanimous support from Camden Council.
The Bayeux Tapestry’s arrival in London follows French president Emmanuel Macron’s announcement of the loan during a state visit to the U.K. in July last year. The Bayeux Museum in Normandy is undergoing a $40 million renovation, and the loan has been hailed as a diplomatic gesture even as some, including David Hockney, have questioned the risks of moving such a fragile, roughly 1,000-year-old work. Its insurance cover is £800 million ($1.1 billion).
For the British Museum, the trees are doing more than decorating an entrance. They are framing a historic object with a landscape of their own, and signaling how the institution wants that encounter to feel: less monumental, more inviting, and unmistakably staged for arrival.
