Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Last week, I shared news about COVID-19 from a British perspective, comparing it with my experience in the St. Louis region of Missouri. Tina is making soup while she stays home and shared a recipe inspired by British chef Nigella Lawson. Jean read The Dark Side of the Sun by Terry Pratchett and Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones.

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When schools started closing, my librarian friends started sharing on-line education resources. My favorites were about virtual museum tours.

Travel + Leisure magazine compiled a list of a dozen of their favorites. I could spend weeks exploring the virtual tour of the British Museum while learning the history of the world.

The Museum Computer Network compiled The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Museum Resources, E-Learning, and Online Collections. From there, I discovered:

• • Art UK is the online home for every public art collection in the UK, featuring over 3200 institutions.
  • English Heritage is the group that cares for over 400 historic monuments, buildings and places (including Stonehenge). Their website is mostly to facilitate visitors, but it’s filled with stunning photos and lots of information.
  • Science Museum Group holds images and information on over 325,000 objects from five different museums in the UK, including the Science Museum in London, where we saw Steam engines and Computers.

I teared up when I read the message on the English Heritage website about their closures:

England’s past is full of stories of hope in the face of adversity, and of people coming together to overcome all kinds of challenges.

I’m visiting the Victoria and Albert Museum website a lot, recently. The V&A is a museum about art and design. They have a database with over half a million images of objects in their collections. They are also generous about sharing those images for use by bloggers like me.

As I announced last week, I’m participating in the 2020 A to Z Challenge. For 26 days in April, I’ll post about What to Pack on Your Creative Journey. The last time I did this challenge, in 2018, my theme was UK & Ireland, so my British Isles Friday posts fit right in. This year, I’ll have to be a little more creative. One way that I’m bringing the British Isles into my A to Z Challenges comes courtesy of the V&A Museum. I’m using an image from their vast database to illustrate each of my posts.

Are you visiting any virtual museums while we’re all sheltering in place?