The British Museum has warned visitors to expect its website to be "very busy" as tens of thousands race to snap up tickets to see The Bayeux Tapestry.
Tickets went on sale at 10am today for the once-in-a-generation exhibition, which will see the 70-metre medieval masterpiece return to the UK for the first time in nearly 1,000 years.
Within a few minutes almost 40,000 people had joined the queue and the waiting time was over an hour.
Anyone hoping to secure a ticket quickly had been urged to log on before the sale opened, to be assigned a place in the queue.
A notice on the website read erlier: “Tickets for The Bayeux Tapestry will be on sale from 10.00 on Wednesday 1 July, and we expect the website will be very busy.
“If you'd like to book for General Admission or a different event we recommend trying again another day.”
Measuring 230 feet in length and 20 inches in height, the woven linen and wool cloth already has 24,000 stains, 16,000 creases, nearly 10,000 holes and 30 rips.
George Osborne, the British Museum’s chairman of trustees, has called the forthcoming exhibition “the blockbuster show of our generation”, and predicted that it would help attract a record number of visitors to the London institution.
The tapestry will be laid flat for the first time in almost 200 years, due to concerns it could be damaged if hung from a display rail.
The exhibition will run from September 10 until July 2027.
Ticket prices range from £25 to £33 depending on the day and time of the visit.
For more information visit britishmuseum.org.