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Like an ageing cabaret star shuffling onto the stage, England really needs no introduction. When even the world’s most remote communities are on first-name terms with its footballers, princes and prime ministers, it’s clear that everyone knows something about this crowded nation, perched on Europe’s western fringe. As a visitor, you can pick your favourite slice of “Englishness” and indulge yourself in a country with a notorious taste for nostalgia. The tales of King Arthur; the works of Shakespeare; the exploits of Drake; the intellect of Johnson; the invention of Brunel; the leadership of Churchill; the cult of Diana – all are endlessly recycled in England, providing a cultural backdrop to an unparalleled range of historic buildings, monuments and landscapes.
Of course, this isn’t anything like the whole story of Eng-land. For every tourist who wants to stand outside the gates of Buckingham Palace or visit Stratford-upon-Avon, there’s another who makes a beeline for the latest
show at Tate Modern or the cityscape of downtown Manchester. Contemporary
England is a deeply conservative place which at the same time has a richly multi-ethnic culture. Famously, fish and chips gave way some years ago to chicken tikka masala as the country’s favourite dish, and while the nation tends to distrust all things European, the English increasingly embrace a continental lifestyle. Enjoy a fried English breakfast or a Devonshire cream tea by all means, but notice the locals at the next-door café-bar tucking into a croissant and a cappuccino.
Ask an English person to define their country in terms of what’s worth seeing and you’re most likely to have your attention drawn to England’s golden rural past. The classic images are found in every brochure – the village green, the duckpond, the country lane and the farmyard. And it’s true that it’s impossible to overstate the bucolic attractions of
various English regions, from Cornwall to the Lake District, or the delights they provide – from walkers’ trails and prehistoric stone circles to traditional pubs and obscure festivals. But despite celebrating their rural heritage, the modern-day English have an ambivalent attitude towards “the countryside”. Farming today forms only a tiny proportion of the national income and there’s a real dislocation between the population of the burgeoning towns and suburbs and the small rural communities badly hit by successive crises in English agriculture.
- As part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (“the UK”), England is a parliamentary democracy, with Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state. Its traditional industries – fishing, farming, mining, engineering, shipbuilding – are all in decline and business today is dominated by banking and finance, the media and technology, steel production, oil and gas, and tourism.
- Bordered by Scotland to the north and Wales to the west, England is the largest country in Great Britain, occupying an area of 50,085 sq miles (129,720 sq km). The terrain is diverse, from plains to peaks, cliffs to beaches, though the superlatives are all modest on a world scale – the largest lake, Windermere, is 10 miles (16km) long, the highest mountain, Scafell, just 3205ft (978m) above sea level.
- The population of approximately 50 million is dense for a country of its size, but settlement is concentrated in the southeast conurbations around London, and in the large industrial cities of the Midlands and the North.
- This is one of the world’s most multi-ethnic countries, made up largely of people of Anglo-Saxon, Scots, Welsh and Irish descent, but with sizeable communities from the Caribbean, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, China, Southeast Asia and
Eastern Europe.
| The national game |
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Football, footie, call it what you will (no English fan ever says “soccer”) – the English invented it and subsequently appropriated it as an expression of (often misguided) national pride. The country has the oldest league and cup competitions in the world, the best-known club on the planet in Manchester United and players who are more famous than pop stars (or, like the incomparable David Beckham, are married to pop stars). For outsiders, though, the nuances of supporting a team can be difficult to unravel. The city of Manchester, like Liverpool and Sheffield, has two teams; London has thirteen (none of them called London). Supporters of geographically adjacent teams (Newcastle and Sunderland, say, or Southampton and Portsmouth) despise the other; while everyone despises Chelsea with its ruthless purchase of success. And once you’ve got to the bottom of this, you still might never get to see a live game as tickets for the famous teams can sell out a year in advance, even at very high prices. You could watch football on TV (between August and May), but for the real experience you have to visit the unfashionable provincial clubs inhabiting the lower divisions. Macclesfield Town against Rochdale on a wet Tuesday night in February – that’s a proper football match.
Everything else is just entertainment.
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So perhaps the heart of England is found in its towns and cities instead? The shift towards urban living and working has been steady since the Industrial Revolution, and industry – and the Empire it inspired – has provided a framework for much of what you’ll see as you travel around. Virtually every English town bears a mark of former wealth and power, whether it be a magnificent Gothic cathedral financed from a monarch’s treasury, a parish church funded by the tycoons of the medieval wool trade, or a triumphalist civic building raised on the back of the slave and sugar trade. In the south of England you’ll find old dockyards from which the navy patrolled the oceans, while in the north there are mills that employed entire town populations. England’s museums and galleries – several of them ranking among the world’s finest – are full of treasures trawled from its imperial conquests. And in their grandiose stuccoed terraces and wide esplanades, the old seaside resorts bear testimony to the heyday of English holiday towns, at one time as fashionable as any European spa.
| Understanding the English |
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As a glance at the tabloid newspapers will confirm, England is a nation of overweight, alcopop-swilling, sex- and celebrity-obsessed TV addicts. But it’s also a country of animal-loving, tea-drinking, charity donors thriving on irony and Radio 4. It’s a country where accent and vocabulary can stamp a person’s identity like a brand, where a tiny land-owning aristocracy, who in some cases trace their roots to the Norman Conquest of the eleventh century, still own most of the land. But it’s also a genuine haven for refugees, and a country of immigrants from more than 100 ethnic backgrounds. It’s a nation where commuters suffer overpriced, under-funded public transport services, and where the hearts of many towns – and increasingly their outskirts – consist of identikit retail zones. Yet it’s also a country where individuality and creativity flourish, fuelling a thriving pop culture and producing one of the most dynamic fashion, music and arts scenes to be found anywhere.
Ask any English person to comment on all of this and – assuming you’re not trying to communicate with a stranger in a public place, which in London at least can be seen as tantamount to physical assault – you’ll get an entertaining range of views. Try to make sense of these, and the resulting picture might suggest something akin to a national identity
crisis – the people themselves can’t agree on who or what they are.
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In short, England isn’t just one place, but a perpetual collision of culture, class and race – the product of multiple identities adapting and somehow fitting together. Its political philosophies and institutions have influenced the most diverse western societies; its idiosyncrasies and prejudices have left their mark across the English-speaking world, and its inventions and creative momentum, from the Industrial Revolution to the Turner Prize, continue to inspire. But the only certainty for visitors is that however long you spend in England and however much you see, it still won’t be enough to understand the place.
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