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LONDON, June 28-- Last weekend, 3.6 million people tuned in to watch dawn break over a cloudy Stonehenge for a virtual celebration of the summer solstice hosted by English Heritage. It meant visitors all around the world were able to watch the sunrise from home, not bothering with the long-distance journey to Britain during the COVID-19 pandemic. Bringing the event online was one of the many ways that the British tourism industry is attempting to reinvent itself and offer new experiences for its visitors. GOING VIRTUAL Normally, around 20,000 people would attend the summer solstice event at Stonehenge -- where the ropes would be cut to allow people into the circle to celebrate the beginning of the day. "This year we couldn't do that, so it was a virtual Summer Solstice," Louise Dando, head of marketing at English Heritage, told Xinhua in an exclusive interview. Due to the coronavirus and social distancing restrictions, many of those experiences have had to be taken online. "We streamed it across the world. Which allowed our audiences, say from China, to go online to the English Heritage website and see the sunrise and experience it, for the first time, from their living rooms," she said. Dando believed it would be an opportunity "in a way", although they had never organized such an event internationally to this extent before the coronavirus outbreak. This year was the 80th anniversary of the evacuation of Dunkirk, an important historical event during World War II. English Heritage had planned a big event at Dover castle to allow people to tour the secret wartime tunnels there and see reenactments. | 
