After eight years of planning, a cost of more than 500m kronor (£39m) and an early morning blessing, a church in northern Sweden began a slow-motion 5km journey on Tuesday to make way for the expansion of Europe’s biggest underground mine.

The 672-tonne Kiruna Kyrka, a Swedish Lutheran church inaugurated in 1912, is to be slowly rolled to its new home over two days, at a pace of half-a-kilometre an hour.

In a huge multi-decade operation, the whole of the Arctic town is being moved as an iron ore mine operated by the state-owned mining company LKAB weakens the ground, threatening to swallow the town.