Language and Culture

Chapter 1 The Shape of Britain

Britain is an island off the north-west coast of con;nental Europe, from which it has
been separated by sea for about 8,000 years. It is the largest of a group of islands
usually known as the Bri;sh Isles. The second largest is the island of Ireland. Together,
these two comprise roughly 95 per cent of the surface area of the archipelago. The
rest is made up of thousands of smaller islands, about 180 of which have residents
year-round.

The seas that surround the Bri;sh Isles are the Atlan;c Ocean, the English Channel,
and the North Sea. The North Sea and the English Channel are linked through the
Straits of Dover. The most important sea within the Bri;sh Isles is the Irish Sea. The
Irish Sea links with the Atlan;c by St George’s Channel to the south (between Ireland
and Wales) and the North Channel to the north (between Northern Ireland and
Scotland). The sea between South Wales and south-western England is the Bristol
Channel. For shipping purposes these seas are subdivided in various ways.

You can hear the Shipping Forecast, a weather forecast specifically for shipping areas, four ;mes per day on BBC
Radio, long wave frequency 198 and digital radio. When the BBC intended to move the evening shipping forecast
to a later schedule, as not a lot of listeners needed it, there was such an outcry that the broadcast ;me was kept:
not many listeners might need the broadcast, but a lot of listeners want it. It has a poetry that no other weather
forecast has, and keeps listeners connected to the seas around Britain. Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “Prayer” reflects
the role of the shipping forecast as a sort of evening ritual, ending with a litany of the names of shipping areas:
“Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.”

Nobody in Britain lives far from the sea. The furthest point inland, near the city of Derby, is almost exactly the same
distance from the sea as Brussels is from Ostend. In fact, it is almost equidistant between two bodies of salt water:
the Mersey Estuary on the Irish Sea, and the Wash on the North Sea. The RNLI (Royal Na;onal Lifeboat Ins;tu;on),
an organisa;on that saves lives at sea, is one of the most popular chari;es in the UK, raising over 100 million
pounds from public dona;ons each year. It provides lifeguards on beaches, runs over 400 lifeboats, and gives
educa;on on safety in and around water, as well as training in rescuing and reviving the drowning, not only in the
UK and Ireland but around the world.

The sense of Britain as set off from the rest of the world by its island status goes back a long way. In his play Richard
II (1597), Shakespeare has John of Gaunt (the king’s uncle) describe the kingdom as:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for her self
Against infec;on and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this lidle world,
This precious stone set in a silver sea
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands ...

This combines several metaphors: England as a throne, as a walled garden, as a natural fortress, as a separate
world, as a precious jewel with the sea as its sefng, and as a moated house. Those within the island are happy
and safe, and those outside are envious. It is the sort of passage from Shakespeare that, up un;l the educa;onal
changes of the 1970s, schoolchildren would be expected to recite from memory. Less well-known is the speech’s
conclusion:

This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,

Dear for her reputa;on through the world,
 Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pel;ng farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and roden parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Ways in which the seas have lately been prominent in public discourse and current affairs include tens of thousands
of migrants crossing the Channel without authorisa;on; debates about fishing rights in the waters around Britain;
raw sewage washing up on beaches because of ineffec;ve regula;on of the sewage processing industry; and the
acquisi;on of energy, from the legacy industry of drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea to new projects to build
offshore wind farms to generate renewable energy.

As will be explained in more detail region by region, the contours of the land of Britain vary from low-lying flatlands
on the east coast (the Norfolk Broads, the Lincolnshire Fens), to rugged mountains in the Scofsh Highlands, taking
in gently rolling green hills and rockier crags at varying stages between. In very general terms, the land gets higher
and rockier the further north and west you travel, almost in a mirror image of Belgium.

Poli;cal

Taken together, the Bri;sh Isles contain three states: the United Kingdom, the Republic
of Ireland, and the Isle of Man (a smaller island in the Irish Sea). The third of these has
the status of a crown dependency: it is closely associated with the United Kingdom
without formally being part of it. Other crown dependencies are the Channel Islands
(Jersey and Guernsey), off the coast of Normandy. The peculiar status of crown
dependencies – in close proximity to the United Kingdom but outside its banking and tax
laws – makes them adrac;ve places for the financial opera;ons of the very wealthy, as
became unusually public in 2017 with the leaking of the ‘Paradise Papers’.

The United Kingdom takes up the whole of the island of Britain, and the many small
islands off its coasts, and a corner of the island of Ireland. The Republic of Ireland
comprises the larger part of the island of Ireland, and the many small islands off its
coasts. As the names indicate, the United Kingdom is a monarchy, now with Charles III
as king, while the Republic of Ireland is a republic, with a president as head of state (currently Michael Higgins).

The United Kingdom consists of four na;ons: England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Of these, by far the
largest, richest and most populous is England, which leads to some carelessness in dis;nguishing between
‘England’, ‘Britain’, and ‘the UK’. That ‘Bri;sh’ is used as the adjec;val form of ‘UK’ (e.g. ‘Bri;sh passport’, ‘Bri;sh
cons;tu;on’) does not really help.

The composi;on of the United Kingdom has changed over ;me, as will be explained in more detail in the historical
chapters below, but in brief: England conquered Wales in the Middle Ages. The kingdoms of England and Scotland
formed a United Kingdom in 1707. From 1801 to 1921 the United Kingdom also included all of Ireland, but aler
1921 only six coun;es remained within the union rather than become part of the Irish Free State (the precursor of
the Republic of Ireland). For centuries before 1800, English monarchs also claimed jurisdic;on over Ireland, but
ruled it as a separate kingdom with its own laws and ins;tu;ons.

The Union Flag (olen called the Union Jack) is a combina;on of English, Scofsh and Irish flags: the cross of St
George (a red upright cross on a white background), the cross of St Andrew (a white sal;re on a blue background),
and the cross of St Patrick (a red sal;re on a white background). The Welsh flag (a red dragon) is not included,
because Wales is not a dis;nct kingdom.
Linguis;c

Five Cel;c languages and two Germanic languages are spoken in the Bri;sh Isles. The Cel;c languages are Irish,
Scots Gaelic, Manx, Welsh and Cornish (both Manx and Cornish died out as na;ve languages, Cornish in 1891 and
Manx in 1974, and had to be revived by language enthusiasts). Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx belong to the Gaelic
branch of the Cel;c family, while Welsh and Cornish, as well as Breton, are Bridonic.

The two Germanic languages are English and Scots, the lader of which is the form of English as it developed in
Scotland dis;nctly from in England. It is some;mes called Lowland Scots (or in Scots itself, ‘Lallans’) to dis;nguish
it from the Scots Gaelic spoken mostly in the Highlands and the Western Isles. There is some debate as to whether
Scots is fully a language or just a dialect of English, but it did have the official status of a regional language under
the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. It is spoken in the Lowlands of southern and eastern
Scotland, the islands northwards, and in parts of Northern Ireland. Examples can be found on the YouTube Channel
of the Scots Language Centre (hdps://www.youtube.com/@ScotsLanguageCentre).

Further, about 2% of the popula;on of Britain speaks a language from the Indian subcon;nent (Urdu, Bengali,
Punjabi, Gujara;, and so forth). In the 2021 census over half a million people (just over 1% of the popula;on) living
in England and Wales listed Polish as their main language, and almost another percent (0.8%) gave Romanian.
Other languages are spoken only by frac;onal percentages of the popula;on. About quarter of a million people,
roughly half of one per cent, speak Bri;sh Sign Language (BSL), the vast majority as a second language rather than
a na;ve language.

Symbolic

Each of the na;ons of the United Kingdom has a set of symbolic associa;ons that are specific to them, marking
their iden;ty as dis;nct from that of the other na;ons. England has par;cular symbolic associa;ons with the rose,
the lion (usually walking or res;ng), the oak tree, the cross of St George, and roast beef. Since the eighteenth
century, a cartoonish figure called John Bull has been an ar;s;c embodiment of Englishness. St George’s Day (23
April), coincidentally the date of Shakespeare’s death, is not a holiday but is some;mes marked with flags (the
Cross of St George flying where the Union Jack might otherwise fly) or the wearing of roses.

Scotland’s symbols include the thistle, the bagpipes, the cross of St Andrew, the kilt, tartan, haggis (which tastes
much beder than any descrip;on of it is liable to sound), and its own lion (rearing up on its hind legs). St Andrew’s
Day, 30 November, is a public holiday in Scotland; on 25 January Scots celebrate Burns Night, in celebra;on of
Robert Burns (1759–1796), their na;onal poet.

Symbols of Wales include the Welsh dragon, the leek, the daffodil, the harp, and most importantly the Welsh
language. Welsh poetry and song are celebrated in local and na;onal compe;;ons called eisteddfods, olen on St
David’s Day, 1 March. There is no real ‘na;onal dish’ but there is a long adachment to toasted cheese, which is
known in English as Welsh rabbit (or some;mes ‘rarebit’).

Northern Ireland is more complex, as it is a divided society where even symbolic iden;ty can be dangerously
controversial, as will be explained later. Symbols that are in use include the cross of St Patrick, the shamrock, the
flax flower, the red hand, and the colours orange and green. St Patrick’s Day, 17 March, is a public holiday, as is 12
July, the anniversary of the Badle of the Boyne: one celebrates a Catholic saint (and is associated with the colour
green), the other a Protestant victory over a Catholic king (and is associated with the colour orange). Parades to
mark 12 July are organised by lodges of Orangemen, who wear orange sashes to mark their adachment to William
of Orange.

Regions: South-East England and London

The most characteris;c landscape of the south-east of Britain is downland: gentle

chalk hills that break off as cliffs at the edge of the sea. The most famous of these
cliffs are the White Cliffs of Dover, which have long been regarded as a sort of
gateway to the country and which overlook one of the busiest passenger ports in
Europe (container ports are another mader). During the nineteenth and twen;eth
centuries there were a profusion of ferry services running across the Channel and the North Sea to a variety of
con;nental ports, but in the twenty-first century Britain has become very largely dependent on the Dover–Calais
link (whether by boat or by tunnel) as a gateway for trucking and travel.

Dover lies in the county of Kent, the south-easternmost county of England,

historically known as the ‘garden of England’ for its many hor;cultural
establishments, producing fruit and hops, but now mostly in the news as a
transport hub servicing London and Dover. The main city in the county is
Canterbury, with one of the oldest and most important churches in England,
Canterbury Cathedral (on which more later).

The economy of the south-east is dominated by London, a city of almost nine

million inhabitants, with large numbers of people across the south-east of England, and even from further afield,
commu;ng to London for work. The economy of London itself is dominated by financial services (banking,
insurance, investment), for which the city is of global importance alongside New York, Tokyo, Shanghai, and
increasingly Frankfurt. The financial ins;tu;ons are concentrated in the
City of London, but now with a lot of back-offices in the redeveloped
Docklands of the East End. The London skyline is dominated by office
blocks, some of quite dis;nc;ve design. Talk of ‘the City’ in Bri;sh English
is olen shorthand for the financial ins;tu;ons in the City of London – just
as ‘Wall Street’ refers to the financial ins;tu;ons in New York.

The Thames flows from west to east through London, and the prevailing wind is westerly, so in the days that the
river was an open sewer and houses, businesses and factories burned coal, the air and the water got dir;er and
smellier towards the east, and were compara;vely cleaner and fresher towards the west. In the eighteenth century
the fashionable part of London, where the rich would build new houses and where the centres of up-market
entertainment were located, was to the west of the old city (the West End, which is now used as shorthand for the
theatres and cinemas of this part of London, for instance in the colloca;on ‘West End musical’), while urban growth
of slums and less desirable proper;es took place to the east of the old city, and south of the river. The East End
developed a dis;nct, working-class culture of its own, with the word ‘Cockney’ coming to denote both this culture
and its language (the closest Belgian equivalent probably being ‘marollien’). While the ‘true Cockney’ might be
vanishing, both as a dialect and as a way of life, the post-war resedlement of Londoners in suburbs and satellite
towns, and the daily commute of tens of thousands of people from across the South East into London, has given
some of its characteris;cs much wider currency in the speech paderns of the wider region, with the term ‘Estuary
English’ coined to cover this range of different local forms of English (par;cularly prevalent on either side of the
Thames Estuary) which have all to some extent been shaped by the diffusion of Cockney elements such as glodal
stops, dropped ini;al h and terminal g, and the /ɹ/ sound becoming /ʋ/ (in effect, r becoming w). Recently, London
street language has seen the development of a new patois (‘roadman’) influenced by the speech paderns of Afro-
Caribbean and South Asian immigrants.

Apart from its financial services, London is characterised by na;onal ins;tu;ons,

especially the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, the government offices in
Whitehall, and central law courts (such as the Central Criminal Court, or Old Bailey,
and the High Court). There are also cultural ins;tu;ons: museums, art galleries,
libraries, theatres, concert halls, several universi;es, publishing houses, and the
headquarters of the BBC and of other media corpora;ons (these can be discussed in
more detail later in the course). London also boasts numerous parks and grassy squares, and a few quite extensive
stretches of rela;vely undeveloped common land, most famously Hampstead
Heath in North London, and Clapham Common and Wimbledon Common in South
London. There is also, naturally, a great variety of shops, markets, pubs and
restaurants catering to the needs of the city’s popula;on and visitors. The
eighteenth-century lexicographer Samuel Johnson famously said that “When a man
is ;red of London he is ;red of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

Aler the Second World War a Green Belt was designated around London, to stop the city from spreading further
into the countryside. Satellite towns or ‘new towns’ were built beyond the Green Belt to provide beder housing
for those crowded together in the bombed-out metropolis. Since new building is extremely restricted in the Green
Belt, exis;ng housing increases in price and desirability, leading to the term ‘Stockbroker Belt’
for the green suburbs where only wealthier people can afford to live. Ordinary people olen
have to find housing beyond the Green Belt, well outside London, making the reliability of trains
and buses vital to the efficiency of the city’s workforce, and constant subjects of public
discussion. In 1997 a new ‘Thameslink’ rail line was opened running all the way through London
from north to south and under the Thames (comparable to the Jonc;on Nord-Midi built in
Brussels decades previously), linking many commuter towns directly through central London, from Cambridge in
the north all the way to Brighton in the south. A new east-west link, ‘Crossrail’, begun in 2007, aler many delays
came into opera;on in May 2023.

Moving down to the south coast, famous towns are Brighton (the southern terminus of the Thameslink rail service)
and Portsmouth. Brighton, with the nearest south-facing beach to London, is known for its waterfront, for its pier,
for the Royal Pavilion (a beach palace built for George IV in Indian Mughal style), and now also for its homosexual
subculture and other alterna;ve lifestyles. It contains the only parliamentary cons;tuency regularly to return a
Green Party MP to the House of Commons.

Portsmouth, further westwards along the south coast, is the home port of the Royal Navy, with the historic
dockyard and the Navy museum preserving ships and artefacts of historic importance, including HMS Victory and
the Mary Rose. Less prominent now in na;onal consciousness, the Royal Navy
was central to Bri;sh power and self-understanding from early in the
eighteenth century to late in the twen;eth, providing the sinews that bound
together the largest empire in the history of the world. Off the south coast, the
Isle of Wight is the largest island to be en;rely English. It is famous for its
landscapes, yacht races and annual rock fes;val. About half the island is
officially designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and a
UNESCO biosphere reserve.

Regions: South-West England

The south-west of England, what is olen called the West Country, is more
agricultural than the south-east. The hills are stonier (olen limestone rather than
chalk); and in the further south-west there is rugged moorland (for example
Dartmoor, pictured). A drink especially associated with the West Country is cider,
and in par;cular a strong, cloudy cider called scrumpy. The county of Devon is
also known for its dairy farming and its dis;nc;ve breeds of dairy cadle. The
cream tea, familiar now across Britain, was once a specialty of Devon.

The south-west is perhaps best known for its ancient remains (the megalithic monuments at Stonehenge, Avebury,
and related sites; and the Roman baths in Bath) and for its links to the legends of King Arthur (Tintagel, Glastonbury,
Salisbury). One of the most interes;ng natural loca;ons is Cheddar Gorge, of botanical, geological and
archaeological interest, frequented by tourists for rock climbing and caving. The caves in the gorge were the original
environment for the making of Cheddar cheese, and have also preserved prehistoric human remains – including
the oldest human skeleton so far found in Britain, Cheddar Man, discovered in 1903 and da;ng to about 9,000
years ago.

In the far south-west is Cornwall, a historically Cel;c corner of England (home of the Cornish language), once
famous for its ;n mines. Bronze is an alloy of copper and ;n, and while the Mediterranean cultures of the Bronze
Age could find plenty of copper in Cyprus, they had to look further afield for ;n. It is widely thought that Phoenician,
Greek and Roman traders visited Britain to obtain Cornish ;n, and there is even a specula;ve legend that if Joseph
of Arimathea was a ;n merchant who visited Britain, he might have brought a young Jesus with him on his trip
(hence “And was the holy Lamb of God, On England's pleasant pastures seen?” in William Blake’s Jerusalem). Tin
and lead mined in Cornwall remained important components in industry right up to the 1860s, by which ;me most
of the miners had lel for other con;nents to make their fortunes in the various gold rushes of the mid-nineteenth
century. The Cornish ;n mines of the eighteenth century provide the sefng for the television costume drama
series Poldark. Cornwall has a climate all its own, due to the influence of the Gulf Stream – currents of warmer
water flowing across the Atlan;c from the Gulf of Mexico – and is the one place in England with a real surf culture.
The most westerly ;p of Cornwall, Land’s End, is a popular holiday des;na;on. Miles beyond Land’s End lie the
Scilly Isles. Although not of any great importance in themselves, they have a par;cular psychological status as the
westernmost outposts of English soil.

There are many famous old ci;es in the south-west, all worth visi;ng for one reason or another, but the main
commercial centre is now Bristol. For a long ;me, Bristol was a busy Atlan;c port, and the city’s harbour gave rise
to the expression “Ship-shape and Bristol fashion” (meaning to be in good order). Like most medieval harbours, it
was not built directly on the sea, but on a river flowing into the sea: the Avon (one of several Bri;sh rivers with
that name, which is the ancient Bri;sh word for ‘river’ – afon in modern Welsh and aven in Breton; another Avon
flows through Straxord, where Shakespeare was born, giving rise to the poe;c epithet ‘the Bard of Avon’,
some;mes shortened simply to ‘the Bard’). The Avon flows into the Bristol Channel, a stretch of sea that separates
South Wales from south-west England, but the main river feeding into the Bristol Channel is the Severn, the longest
river in Britain, which rises in Wales and flows through the West Midlands and southwards into the West Country,
crea;ng the Severn Estuary (see below) north of Bristol.

Regions: West Midlands

Where the West Country merges into the Midlands lie the Cotswolds, an officially designated AONB with limestone
hills and charming lidle towns and old villages. A lot of building in the Cotswolds is in the honey-coloured limestone
uniquely typical of the area. Beyond the eastern edge of the Cotswolds, in the valley of the upper Thames, is
Oxford, with its ancient university, some of which is housed in buildings da;ng back to the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance (many of them used as loca;ons for the Harry Poder films and the long-running detec;ve series
Inspector Morse and its prequel, Endeavour). Cotswold stone can be seen in many of these buildings, too. The city
has also been one of the centres of Bri;sh car produc;on for over a hundred years, most famously now as the
home of the Mini.

The West Midlands was the cradle of the industrial revolu;on, and remains a heavily industrialised region, although
there are of course local excep;ons. The writer J.R.R. Tolkien grew up in a rural village in the West Midlands which
has since been swallowed up by Birmingham, and which influenced his imagining of the Shire. It has been argued
that the spread of industry into his childhood surroundings influenced his imagining of Mordor and of Saruman’s
Isengard:

Iron wheels revolved there endlessly, and hammers thudded. At

night plumes of vapour steamed from the vents, lit from beneath
with red light, or blue, or venomous green. (Lord of the Rings,
‘The Road to Isengard’)

The sort of industry for which the West Midlands is best known is engineering, the making of locks and tools and
clever devices, and most recently making engine components for the automo;ve industry. Jaguar Land Rover has
two important plants in the West Midlands, one assembling Land Rovers and the other building Jaguar engines to
be installed in cars assembled elsewhere, but recent years have seen a series of par;al closures. The part of the
West Midlands best known for industry and engineering is called the Black Country. Like Belgium’s Pays Noir, it
stands on a coalfield. Unlike Manchester or Leeds, or Bradford or Sheffield, where factories employing thousands
of workers were in the hands of rela;vely few owners, in the Midlands there were lots of small engineering firms
with a much more egalitarian ethos. This carries through into social and poli;cal aftudes today: in the West
Midlands class-consciousness is much weaker, and working-class conserva;sm is much stronger, than in the North.

Birmingham itself is the UK’s second biggest city and one of the birthplaces of Bri;sh industry. It was there that the
modern steam engine was invented in 1770. Birmingham’s glorious past is reflected in its nineteenth-century
public buildings and squares, and art galleries with collec;ons endowed by industrialists. The city has a great sense
of civic iden;ty, one more recent symbol of which is the Library of Birmingham, housed in an ultra-modern building
that opened in 2013 as the biggest civic library in Europe. The first book to be
accessioned to the library was Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Immediately aler the Second
World War, however, Birmingham was rather a gloomy place. What the German bombs
had missed, the local authori;es tore down to make way for new and modern
structures, which in those days meant lots of concrete, and relega;ng pedestrians to
tunnels under the roads: the ‘city of the future’ was thought to be a city built for cars.
In recent years some of this has been reversed, making for a much more human urban
environment, with plans now to copy Belgian experiments in restric;ng the access of cars to the city centre. There
is a very dis;nc;ve local accent, known as Brum or Brummie, from ‘Brumagen’, the local name for the city.
Brummies who do well tend to lose the accent, which is one of the few local or regional accents to which some
s;gma is s;ll adached, but the television series Peaky Blinders shows actors making valiant (if not always successful)
adempts to imitate it, and so has made it much more familiar worldwide than it ever was before.

Regions: The North of England

Bri;sh social commentators will olen refer to a “North/South divide”,

referencing the fact that employment, educa;on, life expectancy, public
health, government investment in infrastructure, and many other measures
show a dis;nct divergence between the south of England, with its flourishing
service economy, and the post-industrial north of England, which faces many
of the same problems of industrial decline that have been such a challenge in
Wallonia. The line on the map shown (from the BBC) is a composite of a range
of social, cultural and linguis;c indicators, none of which correspond precisely
with the line drawn. Geologically, the North of England, like the far south-west,
is rockier than the Midlands or the south-east, with moorland and other forms
of marginal farming land suitable for lidle besides grazing sheep, for the wool that was the mainstay of England’s
economy before it became ‘the workshop of the world’. Since 2019 it has been government policy to ‘level up’ the
more disadvantaged parts of the UK by providing addi;onal funding for infrastructure works.

The greatest of the great industrial ci;es of the nineteenth century was Manchester. This was one of the centres
of the industrial revolu;on, par;cularly famous for its codon mills (in this context “mill” means what would now
usually be called a factory: a structure with machinery in it). The Marxist analysis of industrial capitalism drew very
heavily on Friedrich Engels’s experience of industrial condi;ons in Manchester, where small numbers of mill owners
employed thousands of mill hands, and the efforts of industrialists to keep costs low produced a las;ng undertow
of antagonism between the owners paying the wages and the workers earning them, resul;ng in the growth of
“class consciousness”. The codon industry, which a century ago provided almost a quarter of Bri;sh exports, is no
longer a feature of the city’s economic life, and since the 1990s the city has been best known for its music scene,
dance clubs, art galleries and shopping malls: the region’s centre of culture and consumerism.

Liverpool was less of a centre of industry, but was one of the great port ci;es
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a famous waterfront on the
river Mersey that UNESCO once listed as a World Heritage Site under the
designa;on ‘Liverpool Mari;me Mercan;le City’ – a status that was resigned
in order to streamline urban redevelopment. The conurba;on has a highly
dis;nc;ve local accent (partly explained by large-scale Irish immigra;on in
the nineteenth century, and the port’s global connec;ons), and a mixed
reputa;on as a very cheerful, lively place with high rates of unemployment and pedy crime. Like Birmingham,
there is a very dis;nc;ve and somewhat s;gma;sed local accent and dialect, “Scouse”, with those who speak it
called “Scousers” (the accent can be heard in any interview with members of The Beatles, and the dialect in the
Bri;sh Library sound archive, with a discussion of “dockology”, the slang specific to the docks). The city’s role in
the Atlan;c slave trade during the eighteenth century explains the presence there today of the Interna;onal
Slavery Museum (opened in 2007). The estuaries that cut through Britain’s coastline are mostly spanned by bridges,
but in Liverpool the Mersey can s;ll be crossed by ferry, although there are now also two tunnels linking the city
to the far bank. The recently opened two-kilometre Mersey Gateway Bridge is twenty kilometres upstream of
Liverpool, to preserve the city’s historic waterfront.
Northwards along the coast of north-western England lies the seaside resort of Blackpool, famous for its kitschy
entertainments, its pier, Blackpool Tower (a half-sized copy of the Eifel Tower), and its illumina;ons: for ten or
eleven weeks aler the end of the summer season, miles of seafront are lit up with a light show, followed from
November by the separate Christmas lights, extending the tourist season through the autumn and into the winter.
Manchester, Liverpool and Blackpool are all in the historic county of Lancashire, which is now divided into three
areas: Lancashire, Merseyside (the conurba;on around Liverpool), and Greater Manchester (the conurba;on
around Manchester).

The furthest north-western part of England, the county of

Cumbria, contains the Lake District. This area was one of the first
to be officially designated a Na;onal Park. It has the tallest hills and
largest lakes in England, and is a popular holiday des;na;on,
especially for ramblers. A number of poets of the Roman;c period
spent ;me in this part of England, seeking inspira;on in the natural
surroundings, earning them the name Lake Poets. Wordsworth
and Coleridge are the best known of these. About a century later,
the famous children’s author Beatrix Poder (portrayed by Renée
Zellweger in the film Miss Poder) also lived in this part of the world.
Her efforts to preserve the landscape are among the earliest campaigns for ecological conserva;on in the UK.

The Pennines are a chain of hills running down the length of the North like England’s spine, separa;ng it east and
west. On the far side of the Pennines from the rural Lake District is another
of the great industrialci;es of the Bri;sh Isles: Newcastle-upon-Tyne. This
was a city that combined shipbuilding and coalmining, and the abundance
of coal in the area led to the expression “to carry coals to Newcastle”
(meaning to make needless effort: there was plenty of coal there already).
Like Birmingham and other major industrial ci;es of the period, it has
magnificent buildings and art collec;ons endowed by nineteenth-century
industrialists. One of the few Bri;sh shipyards s;ll in opera;on is on the River
Tyne, but now specialises in repairing and conver;ng ships rather than
building new ones. Nearby Sunderland is another centre of car produc;on,
with Britain’s biggest car factory (owned by Nissan) for decades employing
around 6,000 people directly, with another 24,000 jobs in the supply chain.
Conven;onal manufacturing is being reduced, but Nissan plans to turn the factory into a hub of electric vehicle
produc;on. People from the area around Newcastle are known as “Geordies” and speak a dis;nc;ve dialect, also
called Geordie (which can likewise be heard in the Bri;sh Library Sound Archive). The accent will be familiar to
anyone who has heard the presenters ‘Ant and Dec’ on Britain's Got Talent.

South of Newcastle is Durham. Together the eleventh-century castle and cathedral, both Norman buildings clearly
built around 1100, are another UNESCO World Heritage Site (and another filming loca;on for the Harry Poder
franchise). Rather like the bishops of Liège, the medieval bishops of Durham were “prince-bishops”, ruling the land
around their see (the pala;ne county of Durham) as a lord, while also governing the local church. The pala;ne
bishops of Durham were, however, never as independent of the king of England as the prince-bishops of Liège
were of the Holy Roman Emperor.

Southwards from Durham lies the county of Yorkshire, the largest county in England, proud of a reputa;on for
being direct, “no-nonsense”, and hard-headed about money. Besides proud
industrial and farming tradi;ons, the county also has some stunning natural
landscapes. The capital of the county, the city of York, is one of the ancient ci;es
of Britain. It was called Eboracum in Roman ;mes; the current name derives from
the Norse Jorvik (on which more below). York Minster is one of Europe’s great
medieval cathedrals and the city has retained parts of its walls and gates, as well
as some old streets (most famously the Shambles), giving it a medieval feel that
makes it a popular tourist des;na;on.

Other ci;es in Yorkshire are more industrial (or in some cases post-industrial). Leeds and Bradford were famous for
their tex;le factories working primarily with wool (as opposed to the codon worked in Lancashire). With the decline
of the tex;le industry, Leeds has been one of the most successful northern ci;es in building a new, post-industrial
economic base, and is now the third largest and fourth richest city in Britain (aler London, Manchester and
Birmingham). It is also home to the Royal Armouries Museum (perhaps a niche interest). Bradford, in contrast, is
currently infamous for ethnic tensions and the de facto segrega;on of Muslim neighbourhoods and schools.
Sheffield is famous for its steel industry, which is s;ll going strong but employs far fewer workers than previously
(the 1997 comedy film The Full Monty is set in Sheffield, the main characters being laid-off steel workers turned
male strippers). Sheffield is the main town in South Yorkshire, another coalmining area (the 1996 film Brassed Off
is about a brass band in a small colliery town in South Yorkshire). The combina;on of post-industrial ci;es nestled
among beau;ful moors and dales (the sefng for Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights), together with a penchant for
brass bands and stone buildings, makes Yorkshire in many ways strangely like Wallonia.

At the southern end of the Pennine chain is the Peak District, an area of extraordinary natural beauty that was
another of Britain’s first Na;onal Parks (like the Lake District). Much of the Peak District is in the county of
Derbyshire. It is because of the area’s beauty that, in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet
accompanies her aunt and uncle on holiday there, and it is no coincidence that her feelings for Mr Darcy begin to
change when she sees his home in Derbyshire. The ‘capital’ of the Peak District is Buxton, a lidle spa town with an
opera house and an annual arts fes;val. Buxton is also one of the two main brands of bodled water in the UK, the
other being Highland Spring.

Regions: Eastern England

Moving down into the East Midlands, one of the biggest ci;es is Leicester.
This is the only city in the United Kingdom, except for London, where the
popula;on descended from post-war immigrants comes anywhere close to
outnumbering the popula;on of na;ve descent. The main reason for this is
the large Indian popula;on (partly immigrants from India, and partly from
Indian communi;es in East Africa). In most UK towns the Christmas lights
go up in late November or early December. Leicester lights up much earlier,
with the illumina;ons for Diwali. The celebra;on of Diwali in Leicester claims
to be the largest outside the Indian subcon;nent (but it has to be said that
the city of Durban, in South Africa, makes the same claim).

The landscape of the coastal parts of the East Midlands and of East Anglia is reminiscent of Holland. This is partly
simply because the land is very flat and wet, but also because in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Dutch
immigrants were employed to open up these wetlands for farming by the methods that had already proven so
successful in Holland: dikes and drainage canals, and pumps powered by windmills. There is a Second World War
propaganda film, One of Our Aircral is Missing, about the crew of a bomber shot down over Holland being hidden
from the Germans and smuggled back out of the country so that they can return to England. The film was not shot
in Holland, which was under German occupa;on at the ;me, but in the Lincolnshire Fens, which look as Dutch as
one could want. The Flemish Farm, a similar film set partly in Ghent and partly on the Belgian coast, had to use
models and painted backdrops to get the desired look.

The comparable part of East Anglia is the Norfolk Broads,

another very popular holiday des;na;on, par;cularly with
people who enjoy boa;ng. There are lots of waterways
there, and farmhouses and windmills that do look rather
Dutch. Also in the east of England is the other ancient
university, that of Cambridge. Unlike Oxford, the medieval
university town of Cambridge is not enlivened or marred
(depending on one’s view) by modern industry. While
Oxford has produced most Bri;sh Prime Ministers and many
leading poli;cians (the Oxford Union being a play version of
the House of Commons), Cambridge comes second only to
Harvard for the number of its Nobel laureates.

South of East Anglia and north of the Thames Estuary is the county of Essex. Essex is a part of the UK with a very
par;cular stereotype: as the home of upwardly mobile small traders and self-employed skilled workers whose
grandparents were originally from the East End, making more money than their parents did, but with a penchant
for bling, leopard prints, spray tans, and other forms of ostenta;on in dubious taste. The reality TV show The Only
Way Is Essex (or TOWIE) plays up to these stereotypes, which people from Essex might or might not iden;fy with
(see hdps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlOvwlNP2bU). Derogatory jokes about stupid women (olen known as
‘blonde jokes’) can in England take the form of jokes about ‘Essex girls’. In Bri;sh poli;cs of the late twen;eth
century, the shorthand to refer to upwardly mobile, formerly working-class voters switching allegiance from Labour
to Conserva;ve as they bought property and set up their own business was ‘Essex man’. Where Essex begins to
merge into eastern London is Dagenham, the loca;on of the Ford Motor plant that once employed tens of
thousands of people building cars, but now only a couple of thousand building engines to be put in cars elsewhere.
In the Ford Dagenham strike of 1968 the women employed in the plant to sew the car upholstery demanded parity
of pay with male colleagues, resul;ng in the Equal Pay Act of 1970. These events inspired the 2010 film Made in
Dagenham, which was adapted as a musical that ran in London’s West End for six months in 2014-15.

The ancient town of Colchester, the oldest known in England, of Roman founda;on, is in the
north of the county of Essex. Near Colchester is Harwich where there are ferries to the
con;nent from Harwich Harbour (pronounced Arijaba). The UK’s busiest port for container
shipping is just across the Stour estuary from Harwich, a couple of miles easwards, at
Felixstowe in Suffolk (East Anglia). Both are part of a group of ports in eastern England
collec;vely known as the Haven Ports.

Regions: Scotland

As the capital city of Scotland, Edinburgh has since devolu;on in the 1990s been the
seat of the Scofsh Parliament (as it also was before the 1707 Union of England and
Scotland). The old city centre was built against an ex;nct volcano, a par;cularly striking
loca;on, and is dominated by the Royal Mile, a road that runs along the ridge from
Edinburgh Castle at one end to Holyrood House at the other, two impressive royal
palaces. In the eighteenth century, the marshes that protected the southern edge of
the city were drained, and Edinburgh New Town was built in the latest style, an example
of Enlightenment city planning unusual in the United Kingdom. The city is the centre
not only of Scofsh poli;cs and administra;on but also of legal, banking and literary life
in the northernmost of the na;ons of Britain.

Heading up the east coast from Edinburgh, one has to cross the Firth of Forth (the
estuary of the River Forth – the Scots word firth is related to the Norse word ~ord). The road bridge is the brand
new Queensferry Crossing, opened in September 2017, which replaced a 1960s bridge that had become notorious
for its poor state of repair. The much older railway bridge, the Forth Bridge, is a wonder of Victorian engineering
s;ll standing strong.

The economy of the east coast of Scotland (and of the UK as a whole) was radically altered by the discovery of
North Sea oil, with offshore oil plaxorms built to extract it, and onshore facili;es
to process it. Oil installa;ons are s;ll to be found throughout the region, with the
oil capital being the city of Aberdeen, formerly famous for its granite, which gliders
in the sun due to the density of silica crystals it contains, and which was not only
used locally but was also shipped down to London for monumental building works
there. As the oil and natural gas is depleted, there are plans to convert the wells
into carbon storage facili;es to reduce greenhouse gasses, and the ports that
serviced the oil rigs into support centres for offshore wind farms.

The northernmost point of the island of Britain is John o’ Groats. Beyond that are smaller islands that are s;ll part
of the Bri;sh Isles: the Orkney islands, and further north again the Shetlands, known for their ;ny ponies and their
annual Viking-themed fire fes;val (Up Helly Aa), held at the beginning of February. The Orkneys and the Shetlands
were part of the kingdom of Norway un;l the fileenth century, when control passed to the kingdom of Scotland.
Further towards the Atlan;c, off the north-western coast of Scotland, lie the Hebrides, or ‘Western Isles’. The most
important of these is the Isle of Skye, a volcanic island of otherworldly landscapes, so popular with tourists that
CNN in January 2018 listed it as a place to avoid due to overcrowding.

The mountainous mainland of north-western Scotland is known as the Highlands. It is one of the most sparsely
populated parts of Britain and includes such sites of natural beauty as Ben Nevis (the UK’s tallest mountain), Loch
Ness (known for its mythical monster), and Loch Lomond (famous in song). ‘Loch’ is from the Gaelic word for a lake
or inlet, while ‘Ben’ is from ‘beinn’, a Gaelic word for mountain. Highland valleys are known as ‘glens’ (again from
Gaelic).

The south-west of Scotland, just to the south of the Highlands, is dominated by the city of Glasgow, the largest city
in Scotland, on the river Clyde. It was another of the great industrial ci;es of the nineteenth century, once known
as “the second city of the Empire”, with (like Newcastle) both shipbuilding and a nearby coalfield. The city has
impressive art collec;ons and fine buildings. Glasgow has also, however, had some of the most notorious slums in
Britain, with the Gorbals a par;cular byword for depriva;on, and the country’s highest rates of knife crime,
drunkenness and heart disease.

Regions: Northern Ireland

Anybody who has followed the television series Game of Thrones has seen
hills, caves and beaches that are now more than ever touted by Northern
Ireland’s tourism industry. On the northern ;p of the province is a volcanic
phenomenon without equal: the Giant’s Causeway, an uneven pavement of
basalt pillars, stretching out into the sea towards Scotland like an interrupted
bridge. According to legend the Irish giant Finn MacCool built the causeway
to get to Scotland, and a Scofsh giant destroyed it to prevent him. The largest lake in the U.K. is Lough Neagh in
the centre of NorthernIreland.

The capital of Northern Ireland is Belfast, which was the only major industrial city in nineteenth-century Ireland. It
was famous for linen tex;les, and for the Harland & Wolff shipyards that built such great vessels as the Titanic and
the Olympic. Efforts to keep the shipyards alive have been much in the news in recent years, with investors found
just before Christmas 2019 to run them as facili;es for building offshore wind turbines, and a Ministry of Defence
contract for three new naval vessels announced in December 2022. Linen is spun from flax, hence the adop;on of
the flax flower as a symbol for the province.

The legend of St Patrick using a shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit:
of one substance but dis;nct in persons) to his Irish converts in the filh century is the reason for
its use as a symbol for Ireland. Academic historians of early medieval Ireland insist that while
Patrick was certainly an inspiring and influen;al figure in the early history of Irish Chris;anity, there
were already Chris;ans there before he arrived. Serious scholars can be infuriated by the con;nual
popular repe;;on of the legends (such as that of the shamrock) and over-simplifica;ons (such as Patrick being the
first to bring Chris;anity to the Irish) that make up the popular version of this history.

Other ci;es in Northern Ireland are Derry, or Londonderry, which retains its city walls in memory of the siege they
withstood in 1689, and Armagh, the see of St Patrick, the Apostle to the Irish. Derry is the backdrop to Derry Girls,
a recent television comedy drama set during the Northern Irish Troubles of the late twen;eth century. There are
two cathedrals in Armagh: one going back to the Middle Ages, and in use by the Church of Ireland (the Irish branch
of the Anglican communion) since the Reforma;on; and a Catholic cathedral built in the nineteenth century, aler
a couple of centuries in which the Catholic majority in Ireland were subject to laws restric;ng their ability to build
churches or worship publicly – among many other legal disadvantages, including being barred from owning land
or sifng in Parliament. One of the defining characteris;cs of Northern Ireland is the ethnic-religious division
between Irish Catholics and Scots Irish Protestants, the lader descended from seventeenth-century sedlers planted
in Ulster to pacify the region. Sectarianism (prejudice on the basis of religious denomina;on) is s;ll a serious
problem, although it has not in recent years led to the degree of violence that marred the province in the late
twen;eth century.

Northern Ireland was created precisely because the Scots Irish who formed a majority
in six north-easternmost coun;es of Ireland were strongly opposed to becoming a
minority in an Irish state with a Catholic majority when the rest of Ireland gained a
measure of independence as the Irish Free State (which in 1949 became the Republic
of Ireland). The Catholic Irish minority in those six coun;es would mostly have
preferred to be part of the Free State, or later the Republic, than to remain in the
United Kingdom. The religious divide between Catholics and Protestants corresponds
to a poli;cal divide between ‘na;onalists’ or ‘republicans’, on the one hand, and
‘loyalists’ or ‘unionists’ (wan;ng to maintain the Union with Britain) on the other. All
speak English, but for cultural reasons emphasize the importance of Irish and/or
Scots. A century aler the par;;on of Ireland, the 2021 UK census (the data from
which is s;ll being processed) found that for the first ;me the Catholic popula;on
outnumbered the Protestant popula;on in the province.20 What poli;cal or cons;tu;onal impact this might have
remains to be seen.

The Republic of Ireland

The only country with which the UK has a land border is Ireland, which from 1801 to 1922 was itself part of the
United Kingdom. Through much of the nineteenth and twen;eth centuries, Ireland was a country of emigra;on,
especially to the United States and other parts of the English-speaking world. There was very lidle in the way of
industry beyond breweries, dis;lleries and creameries. Guinness stout and Jameson whiskey are s;ll among the
country’s most recognisable exports (and in the UK, Irish buder, beef and bacon all have a high reputa;on). Its
highest value exports, however, are now in the pharmaceu;cal, medical and biotech fields. In the 1980s and 1990s
the Irish economy took off in a big way, and Ireland suddenly became a country of immigra;on rather than
emigra;on. This had a lot to do with low corpora;on tax – the default rate set at 12.5% – adrac;ng mul;na;onals
to base their European opera;ons in Ireland. This makes Irish GDP sta;s;cs somewhat unreliable, because they
reflect the movement of mul;na;onal money as much as the growth of the Irish economy itself. Because
interna;onal money was so much part of this boom, the banking collapse of 2008 hit Ireland par;cularly hard, but
it is now recovering. Dublin, known for its Georgian and Victorian architecture, has become one of the most
expensive European capitals to live in. The city has several universi;es, but the oldest and most pres;gious is Trinity
College Dublin, one of the seven “ancient” (pre-1600) universi;es in the Bri;sh Isles.
The Irish countryside is famously green, in part because it is also famously wet. If Belgium seems rainy, reflect that
in an average year the west of Ireland gets twice as much rain as Brussels does. Like a soufflé that has failed to rise,
Ireland is hilly around the edges with a depression in the centre. The water runs off
the hills into the interior, where it forms bogs and flows off in rivers, the largest of
them the Shannon.

Although there is a na;ve Cel;c or Gaelic language in Ireland, the Irish language, most
of the popula;on are na;ve speakers of English. Irish is obligatory in school and is
required for government service, and is also the official na;onal language of Ireland
(as well its official language in the EU ins;tu;ons). But it is not widely spoken in daily
life outside a few areas, mostly in the West of Ireland, known as the Gaeltacht (see
map). This course outline focuses on the UK, but the long, historic connec;ons
between Britain and Ireland, and the contemporary significance of the Irish border,
make it impossible to exclude Ireland from any considera;on of Bri;sh history and
poli;cs.

Regions: Wales

There are two main ferry routes from Ireland to Wales: one to Fishguard in South Wales, and the other to Holyhead,
a town on a lidle island off the coast of North Wales. Since Elizabethan ;mes the route taken by the English posts
(and laderly railway connec;ons) for Ireland was through Holyhead. In his autobiography Just a Phrase I’m Going
Through, the well-known linguist David Crystal describes the linguis;c implica;ons of his childhood in this Welsh
town that links England and Ireland.

North Wales is famously mountainous, with the UK’s only real

mountains outside Scotland. The UK’s third Na;onal Park, Snowdonia,
lies in this area, which include Mont Snowdon, Britain’s tallest
mountain outside Scotland. The North was the part of Wales that
retained its independence the longest, and where Welsh is s;ll most
spoken. It is doded with remnants of medieval military architecture,
tes;mony to how hard the kings of England had to work to bring
North Wales under their control, and is one of the best places in Europe to study castles.

South Wales is more industrial, with the Welsh Valleys best known for ironworks and coalmining, both of which
have greatly declined in recent decades, and for the importance of rugby and male voice choirs to local social life.
The comedian and singer Max Boyce (world famous in Wales) gives expression to the enthusiasms and sorrows of
life in the Valleys. Cardiff is the capital of Wales, and the loca;on of the Welsh Assembly, or Senedd. South Wales
is separated from south-western England by the Bristol Channel and the Severn Estuary, now spanned by the
Severn Crossings, which have become a real landmark for Welsh people travelling home from London.