All links courtesy of the i newspaper. Click on the blue links below to go to the relevant websites
Nottingham Contemporary, East Midlands
The Riba Award-winning building is one of the largest contemporary art institutions in the UK. There is a fully immersive virtual reality tour of the recent exhibition, Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance, Act 1 (2018–19).
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Arts, Gateshead
Join video tours of the current exhibitions housed in the former industrial building on the south bank of the River Tyne. BALTIC is an unusual space in that it has no permanent collection, meaning exhibitions remain fresh.
Take a virtual tour of the Ice Age to Iron Age Gallery or go behind the scenes at Biology and Ethnography stores at the museum that sells itself as “the world under one roof”. Discover the stories behind some of the museum’s most-loved objects.
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, West Midlands
Filmed in summer 2019, these four tours show you all the art and history galleries, starting in the Round Room, which dates to 1885 when the building first opened. Continue to scroll through 700 years of art, as the galleries take you from the 14th to 20th century.
The world’s first ocean-going liner was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and launched in 1843. You can take in 360-degree views of the Dockyard Museum and ship via their website.
The Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery is the most popular free-to-enter visitor attraction in Scotland and the most visited museum in the UK outside London. The virtual tour features 28 locations and shows Dali’s priceless painting Christ of St John of the Cross.
More than eight million artefacts can be found inside the British Museum and most of them can be viewed online. Two of the galleries have digital versions: Prints and Drawings, from artists including Degas and Henry Moore, and Oceania.
The National Gallery is home to thousands of publicly owned artworks from the UK and Europe, spread across 18 rooms, which you can visit with its virtual tours. The site offers detailed information about every painting on display, as well as floorplans to navigate around as though you are there.
The National Portrait Gallery, London
Take in Renaissance masterpieces from Northern Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany, including works by Titian, Veronese and Holbein as part of these panoramic tours.
Natural History Museum, London
Wander the museum’s halls from the comfort of your own home, inspecting the butterflies, birds, beasts and fossils in the collections up close. An interactive online guide includes insights into some of the 80 million specimens.
Explore 351 artworks in a chronological display of Britain’s greatest artists, taken from the Tate’s collection. Instead of designated themes or movements, the tour is arranged by decade, so you can see an array of art made at any one moment.
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Journey through 5,000 years of human creativity in its online collections, which encompass everything from ancient Chinese ceramics to Alexander McQueen evening dresses. Collections are easy to navigate and can be explored by people, periods, techniques, places and more.
There are virtual tours into the extensive stacks, where you can discover literature from medieval to Victorian times, as well as a number around past exhibitions, including Harry Potter: A History of Magic, which has a section for each of the Hogwarts magic classes.
Panoramic tours take you under the wings of historical aircraft in the museum’s cavernous hangars and Bomber Hall.
This newly created Frida Kahlo collection brings together artwork and artifacts connected to the Mexican artist from 33 museums and cultural collections around the world, including the V&A and La Casa Azul (The Blue House), where she was born and died.
One of the Netherlands’ most popular cultural institutions is home to famous pieces like The Milkmaid by Vermeer and Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. They can all be delved into in the museum’s virtual gallery tours.
The gallery has the largest collection of the artist’s work anywhere – that’s more than 200 paintings and 750 letters. You can read his biography, discover the stories about his life and work and explore his paintings, drawings and letters in the online collection.
Take a virtual look at collections from the five museums on this Berlin island: the Altes Museum, the Neues Museum, the Alte Nationalgalerie, the Pergamonmuseum and the Bode-Museum.
You can click your way through the halls and galleries of this former railway station, by the Seine in central Paris, which houses the world’s largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist artworks.
The world’s largest art and antiques museum has world-famous pieces such as the Mona Lisa or the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
The 16th-century halls and matchless Italian Renaissance collection of Florence’s Uffizi Gallery are available to explore via Google Maps. To name a few, you can see Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Dürer’s Adoration of the Magi and Caravaggio’s Bacchus.
You can take a virtual tour through the extensive collections of art, archaeology and ethno-anthropology gathered by the Popes over the centuries, housed in the lavish Apostolic Palace.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Recently designated a part of a Unesco World Heritage site, this futuristic museum building has come to be known as Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece. You can explore the site in VR.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Experience standing in an empty gallery after hours, witnessing a bustling space in time lapse, or floating high above the Cloisters for a bird’s-eye view of the Met’s art and architecture.
The Smithsonian, Washington DC
The world’s most popular natural history museum has virtual tours galore, including the Butterfly Pavilion, the Deep Time Hall of Fossils and the Hall of Human Origins. You can also visit the US National Portrait Gallery’s presidential portrait collection.
J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Explore art from ancient to contemporary times at the museum’s two LA locations on this virtual tour. The collection includes European paintings, drawings, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, decorative arts, and European, Asian, and American photographs.
NASA Mission Operations Room, Maryland
Take a virtual tour of the Hubble Space Telescope’s home for mission operation. There is the Operations Room, where the flight operators command and monitor Hubble and the Operations Support Room, where the flight team investigates spacecraft anomalies.
The Museu de Arte de São Paulo was Brazil’s first modern museum. Its striking architectural design by Lina Bo Bardi has made it a landmark of 20th-century architecture. Visit its extensive collections or explore the striking building.
National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City
Explore the world’s largest collection of ancient Mexican art and ethnographic exhibits about Mexico’s present-day indigenous groups.