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Clearly there are no tours of Buckingham Palace happening at the moment. Heck, even the Queen herself has got the hell out of Dodge and is holed up in Windsor Castle, no doubt washing her royal hands fastidiously and scrupulously taking a single piece of exercise per day in the extensive grounds.
However, there’s another, fairly simple way to take a mooch around London’s seat of royal power: do it digitally! There’s a full-on tour of Buckingham Palace’s State Rooms available via the Royal Collection Trust, and while sadly that doesn’t let you peep into even a virtual version of Her Majesty’s bedchamber, you do have the considerable upside of being able to take a leisurely perusal of more than 250,000 works in the Royal Collection, one of the most spectacular stashes of art on the planet.
You can also take a look at the recent ‘George IV: Art & Spectacle’ exhibition, a look at the tastes of the extravagant regent-slash-monarch, and ‘Prince & Patron’, which gathers up some of the art of choice of everybody’s favourite self-isolating heir, HRH Prince Charles.
There are also about a gazillion other things – want to read up to 43,000 pages Queen Victoria’s personal journal from the comfort of your laptop? You can! Want a game for kids where they can pretend to defend Windsor Castle from attack by an invading army? They can! (It’s called ‘Bring on the Battle’). Basically now is pretty much the most perfect time in history to spend a day or two have a full-on home-based royalty binge, and boy does the Royal Collection have the goods to distract you.
Access Buckingham Palace and the Royal Collection online here.
Take a look at some haunting photos of London’s busiest landmarks now they’re totally empty here.