Do the arts have an important role within modern day Britain?

I would
agree with the other answer that the main role the arts play in modern Britain is to fuel
tourism, an important industry in that country. Britain is especially a premier home of
literature, having produced what is considered the greatest body of literature in the world, but
also contains great works of art and architecture. As the world's superpower and premier Empire
in the nineteenth-century, it gathered important art from all over the world into its museums
and great homes. The British Museum, for example, is home to such treasures as the Greek Elgin
marbles.

Tourists can also visit such sites as the homes of Virginia Woolf,
Jane Austen, the Brontes, the Wordsworths, Shakespeare, and morea list too exhaustive to
catalogue. It is home, too, to such architectural treasures as Saint Paul's cathedral
and...