Despite having written for years about quiet places in London, there are only three places in London where I feel completely at peace. The first is Lesnes Abbey, a ruined set of buildings at the far end of the Elizabeth Line where you can still make out a church, kitchens and cloisters of an abbey below the idyllic woods beyond it.

The second is the Wolsey Closet at Hampton Court Palace, which many visitors walk straight past but where you can feel completely alone but surrounded by people. The third, and the only one in central London, is the Charterhouse near Farringdon.

I had the pleasure of visiting this latter medieval and Tudor building yesterday and, while enjoying the break in the clouds in Charterhouse Square, had a quick look at their online content for The Great Chamber, which isn’t included in the main visitor route.

The Great Chamber dates from the 1540s and is the only surviving Tudor great chamber in London. Not surprisingly, the Charterhouse want to show it off and have embedded a 3D model of the space on their website, complete with label text for the objects within it. It’s such a great use of 3D modelling and demonstrates how the heritage world is exploring platforms such as Sketchfab to help digital visitors explore their spaces.

Elsehwhere, private musems such as the Chitra Collection are using Sketchfab in the platform itself to show off objects in their collections. This monkey teapot always makes me chuckle, and you can even zoom in to see how it’s made inside.

The Sketchfab platform works in the same way as YouTube – where sites create their own channel on the platform – in essence, it’s social media for 3D models. Heritage sites can also embed the models on their websites for free, even if the models were captured by someone else. For example, the Great Chamber model was captured by artfletch, who has received over one million views and 9,200 followers on the platform in his free time.

As with so much digital content, it seems the only barrier is access to equipment and time. But with a little collaboration, we can achieve so much more than we can on our own.