i * How's that! * The Great Tea Robbery * Morris Dancing * St George ~ Patron Saint of England * An Historic Land * Gardens * New Gardens on New Estates * China Invasion * Agragarian & Industrial Revolutions from 1760 * Social Change before Victoria * Social Change from Victoria until now * Parliament: The Cabinet & Ministers * Parliament & Elections * The British People * Agriculture * A Broad outline of Culture of the United Kingdom - with links *

2009.08.23.
How's that! England's captain Andrew Strauss lifts the Ashes urn as his teammates crack open the bubbly

The Great Tea robbery:

How our cuppa wouldn't exist if an amazing Victorian hadn't stolen the secret from China's warlords By Tony Rennell

Now, in the likely event that you are at this very moment drinking tea - likely because, as a nation, we pour 150 million cupfuls down our throats every day - you might care to give a nod to the memory of a tall and lean Scotsman by the name of Robert Fortune, a forgotten hero for the millions of us who swear by the amber nectar, the 'liquid jade', the cuppa, a brew, char.

Tea drinking in Britain could have died out if it wasn't for the efforts of a Victorian adventurer

Tea picking: Britain had to infiltrate the way the Chinese grew and produced tea

Green tea and black tea were not different species, as had been thought, but leaves from the same plant differently processed, one fermented, the other not.
He also discovered, to his horror, that the tea we were drinking should carry a health warning. The Chinese were routinely slipping coloured dye into the tea intended for Britain because they thought we wanted it greener than it was naturally. The dye was Prussian Blue, a form of cyanide. For years, tea had been poisoning us.

photo: Nick Meers top, Stephen Robson bottom, Jennie Woodcock right. Stourhead, Wiltshire.

National Trust Photographic Library. See National Trust: www.nationaltrust.org.uk

Gardening began in England with the Romans, who constructed the magnificent garden at Fishourne, near Chichester , which was discovered only in the 1960s and measures 6,700sq meters. Its design was regular and ordered, an exercise in elaborate geometry, not unlike the formal Renaissance gardens to be found later in Italy and France .

The medieval garden was constructed in a series of walled enclosures each containing simple plantings of fruit trees, roses and herbs in rectangular beds. In the literature and poetry of this time, the rose was the symbol not only of love, as it is today, but of Christ’s suffering on the cross. Herbs were used for medicinal purposes,as they are in China, but also to hide various offencive odours. At the Elvaston Castle Country Park in Derbyshire is an authentically preserved medieval walled garden of roses and herbs.

In Elizabethan England, aromatic plants were incorporated into elaborate carpet-like patterns known as knots. The Tudor garden was an enclosed square, firmly separated from the natural world beyond, so that it felt more like an extra room than the great outdoors. Flowers, many of them brought from abroad, were planted in geometric shapes, often meticulously balanced emblems, such as coats of arms,separated by low hedges with gravel paths between them. They looked like nothing more than horticultural embroidery. Excellent examples of Tudor gardens can be seen today at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, at Packwood House in Warwickshire.

Topiary - the artistic cutting and pruning of bushes, and mazes are also Renaissance garden traditions. Both techniques were originated by the Romans but elaborated by Italian horticultural designers. The 15^th Century Medici garden in Florence had elephants, a wild boar, a ship with sails, a ram, a hare with its ears up, a wolf fleeing from dogs, and an antlered deer. Topiary today in England may not be as extravagant as that, but outstanding work can be seen at Hampton Court,outside London and the home of King Henry VIII .

The taste for small flower beds arranged in fanciful patterns persisted into the 17^th and 18^th centuries. During this time there developed more interest in elaborate waterworks, with fountains and canals bringing the sound of running water into the garden. The basic square of the Tudor garden became more sophisticated, with tree-lined avenues fanning out from a semicircular patte d’oie (meaning literally 'goose’s foot'). Good examples of these are the gardens at Melbourne hall in Derbyshire and Bramham Park in Yorkshire .

In the middle of the 17^th Century the tulip craze began, which started a trade unlike anything else in the history of commerce. The seeds of the flowers were brought from Europe during the 16^th Century. The flower was called 'the tulipa' on account of the resemblance it bore to a turban, tulbent in Italian. So highly pried were these curious upstanding flowers that the bulbs were more precious than metals. In some cases 2,500 and even 4,600 florins were paid for one root of this sought-after plant,a huge sum of money in those days. (a florin is the equivalent of 10 pence in UK money,one tenth of a pound or 1.5RMB).

It was not until the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries that the French influence was at its peak, epitomised in the magnificent gardens of Versailles, outside Paris. 'The miracle which Monsieur le Notre made,' as Louis XIV termed it. Le Notre, Louis’ landscape designer, captured exactly the grandeur of the French monarchy at its height and gave the Sun King a setting worthy of his place at the centre of the universe, although it was at ruinous expense to the economy and eventually lead to the bloody French Revolution, resulting in France becoming a Republic.

Strong avenues leading from the palace formed the basis of the plan, which was then grandly embellished with domes and triumphal. The contrast between Versailles and the Elizabethan gardens shows that the history of gardens is not a matter of greenery, or even simply of fashion; it reflects closely the philosophical and cultural ideals of each age.

New Gardens on the Great Estates

It was not long before the new sensibility began to materialise on the great estates of England . At Castle Howard, for example, Vanbrugh designed a vast ornamental landscape dominated by magnificent buildings set in grassy spaces. Vanbrugh’s Temple of the Four Winds shows the beginning of the crucial collaboration between gardener and architect.

At Stowe, the landscape gardener Charles Bridgeman used the 'Ha-ha', a relatively new device, to greater effect. An 'ha-ha' is the boundary between a garden and a park in the form of a deep, wide ditch that, while acting as a barrier to farm animals, does not disrupt the view. The name is said to have come from the exclamation of 'Ah- ha!' made by the first people who came across it. Thus the formal garden, as an enclosed space close to the house, simply melted away, and the surrounding park lands, as far as one could see; all became part of the gardens.

It was at Stowe that Lancelot Brown worked as a practical gardener from 1740 to 1751. He was later to be called 'the monarch of the landscape' , and to earn the name 'Capability Brown' for his work as the most influential landscape gardener of the 18th Century. Brown would travel by horseback from one aristocratic client to the next, pointing out the 'capabilities of improvement' in each estate, hence earning both his fee and his nickname.

Brown’s ideas about what an improvement was different from those of his predecessors and were controversial for a time. Brown emphasised not colour or statuary, but the basic elements of a site - its contours, water and tree lines. He stripped away all ornamental paraphernalia amid installed gardeners to present, as far as possible, the landscape in its natural state. The Garden was no longer a separate area; he made the parkland sweep right up to the house. Trees and plants were used to punctuate the lines of the land - and punctuate was Brown’s own ideas. In describing his own technique, he said, 'Now, there I make a comma, and there a parenthesis - now a full stop, and then begin another subject.'

Brown was particularly ingenious with water and liked to create elegant lakes. Brown designed as many as 200 gardens, mostly in the Home Counties and Midlands - around London and in central England . Besides Blenheim Palace, a Royal residence, others include Chatsworth House in Derbyshire and Longleat in Wiltshire. All are open to the public on payment of an entrance fee.

Not everybody was impressed and influenced by Brown’s work. Many disliked his 'shaved lawns and thought that his choice of trees, (Brown used only British natives with the exception of the Lebanon cedar), became tiresome. He had no use for flowers as decorations and confined them to the Kitchen garden. One critic even parodied Brown’s description of his work as a literary text by comparing his parks to 'sheets of green paper with a parcel of round clumps scattered over them like so many spots of ink flicked at random out of a pen.' Brown’s work came so close to fulfilling its goal of naturalness, that at times his gardens could not be distinguished from fields.

When Brown died some of his followers continued to work in his style, but without his genius for the serene line enhanced by the inspired interruption. It is hardly surprising that the landowners of England were ready for a change. Sir Humphrey Repton supplied the new blood which was so urgently needed. Born in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, in 1752, Repton spent his early years gaining a European education. When he failed as a businessman in his middle age he turned to landscape gardening, working for many of the high society friends he had won over the years.

Repton made several important modifications, or changes to Brown’s style. He was more interested in the social uses of garden than in its 'picture-esqueness' (literally, its similarity to a picture). He re-defined the relation between gardening and painting, insisting that they were not 'sister arts but rather congenial natures brought together like man and wife –and you should recollect the dangers of interfering in their occasional differences.' The influence of the Grand Tour* designers like Burlington , Kent , and Temple was to be ignored. Repton pushed back the park and reinstated regular forms such as terraces, raised flower beds and conservatories to make the garden (like the old Tudor garden) a social space which was an extension of the house. It is hardly surprising that, with his sensitivity to the ways of social inter-action, Repton eventually designed the gardens of many of the London squares and country houses throughout England.

China Invasion

At this time there was a growing taste for 'chinoiserie' - Chinese style, and oriental fashion strongly influenced the work of Sir William Chambers at Kew . Gardeners sought once again to make the gardens sociable; pagodas, bowling greens, shell grottoes and flowering shrubs both recalled ancient virtue and stressed the achievement of modern culture.

With the Romantic movement during the late 1700 and early 1800's, and its emphasis on the imagination, man’s view of nature began to change. Eager for the lofty sublime of mountains and dramatic scenery, the eye grew impatient with tamed gardens and sought further afield for something to soothe its restlessness. Something of the opposite also occurred, however, if Dorothy and William Wordsworth could not get enough of the spectacular Lake District , they also paid close attention to their small garden at Dove Cottage.

By the beginning of the 19^th Century, the cottage garden had come into its own, with its vegetable patch, fruit trees and abundant flower beds, filled with a myriad of colourful blossoms. The garden in the form of climbing roses and creepers seemed to cover the cottage itself which, in early summer, was festooned with vivid colours - and insects!. Hidcote Manor in Gloucestershire is a good example of a grand 20^th Century country garden based on cottage garden principles, and the National Garden Scheme, a charitable trust with offices in Lower Belgrave Street , London , can direct visitors to more than 1,000 privately owned cottage gardens around the country.

By the Victorian Age, gardeners had once again become interested in the details which go into making up a landscape, namely in plants themselves - something that had been ignored by Brown. A period of enthusiastic experimentation and of importation followed, when collectors like David Douglas, William Cobb and Robert Fortune shipped many new species home. These were crossbred with native stocks in the greenhouses which were rapidly being built in Victorian gardens and fast becoming a standard feature in British gardens.

To some, however, the Victorians went overboard in their garden designs, embellishing them with as much zeal as their cluttered and cramped parlours. Urns, statues and other outdoor knick-knacks were mass-produced and packed into every available corner of the garden. The English garden by now was an explosion of colour.

In the present century, the garden has lost none of its attraction for the creative mind as well as for the amateur enthusiast. During the second World War,it was an essential facility to provide much needed food, which was in short supply. Today, although there are many keen amateur gardeners.

* The Grand Tour - during the 18th century,it became popular for people who could afford it, to travel for perhaps a month, 3 - 6 months or even a year, throughout Europe, to expand their cultural understanding, visiting cities such as Rome, Venice, Florence and Paris.

Today, a similar situation exists in the west, where students take a 'gap-year' between graduating and starting out on their careers. Often they work their way round the world, taking part-time or casual jobs. The United States, Canada, Australia and South-east Asia are common destinations, including China.

Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions from 1760.

The middle years of the 18^th Century saw two revolutions in England , neither of them political: the agrarian revolution, which put agriculture on a new and efficient basis, and the industrial, which began to change the land, the economy, and the people dramatically.

In the fields, landlords enclosed their holdings. No longer would tenants lose the value of their working harder than their fellow villagers, or of the innovations they made.

Making each landholder responsible for himself increased efficiency. New Methods of cattle breeding resulted in a higher yield per hoof; gentlemen farmers began introducing new technologies which increased output.

In industry, the revolution took three courses: technology, transport, and organization. Arkwright¡¦s water frame, Hargreaves's spinning jenny, and Crompton's spinning mule made old methods of yarn production obsolete. John Wilkinson developed new uses for iron. James Watt invented the steam engine in 1769. The potholes of the Great North Road improved from new methods of road-building, with innovations from the likes of John McAdam ; more importantly, canal building made inland transport faster and cheaper. Railways were built - Stevenson's Rocket and new technologies from the brilliant genius of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Many manufacturers formed associations to share information and press for common ends.

These revolutions had great impact on British life. New attention was paid to utility, efficiency, and self-help, under the utilitarian doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. Thrift and hard work were prized as old Puritanism found a new release in political and economic theory and behavior. Citizens undertook new projects to put towns on a more well-organized basis. The children of the poor were put to work repetitive task suited them well, and religious leaders like John Wesley taught that long hours of work in dirty factories, would help the tiny soul avoid eternal damnation.

Factories exacted much from the lives of the poor who operated them; 16-hour days and early deaths faced the workers. The established Church did not concern itself much for their welfare as 'they weren't respectable' ; by the mid 18^th Century, Anglicanism was stuck in a rut from which it would not escape for three generations.

Social Change before Victoria

In 1789, the picture changed dramatically. The revolution in France brought terror to everyone in the higher classes, that England too might be the setting for political horrors. The year 1793, with the mob lopping off Louis XVI's head, brought memories of 1649, and everyone now prepared for war with France. Under the Napoleon Bonaparte , France made war inevitable, and England now prepared to destroy, or be destroyed by, the Gallic juggernaut.

The next 22 years was one of almost almost continuous war as Europe struggled to defeat Napoleon. The early war at sea resulted victory for Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar in 1804, commemorated in Trafalgar Square, in the heart of London . The later continental land war finally resulted in Napoleon's final defeat by the Duke of Wellington, near Waterloo , Belgium , in 1815, which The Duke later described as 'a damned nice thing'. Pitt, meanwhile, had died in 1806.

Back in Britain , the industrial revolution picked up its pace. The revolution was changing the face of the countryside: rural hamlets gave way to factory towns built on the most up-to-date schemes. Provincial banks sprang up to provide capital for further expansion.

In the countryside, poor harvests and the war increased prices for farm goods. More efficient agriculture threw farm laborers out of work. They entered a poverty even more abject than that of the city, leading to the Speenhamland system of 1795 to provide poor persons with relief.

In 1815, after the Congress of Vienna, Britain emerged as the greatest and richest of the European powers. Its mortal enemy, France, lay vanquished. Britain controlled world trade in its world empire, yet the deplorable state of the nation's poor and the unrest among the intelligentsia appeared to herald great social changes and many men were alarmed about the future.

The first third of the 19th Century, in the reigns of George IV (Regent, 1810-1820 and king, 1820-1830) and William IV(1830-1837), was the scene for great reform in Britain . This was largely the result of the industrial and French revolutions with their wholly-new placement of men in what would gradually become more and more a democratic and mass industrial society.

By 1815, the population of Britain mounted to 13 million, with over 1 million in London alone. Steadily, the population shifted from countryside to town as rural labourers and their families, thrown out of work in the fields, tried to support themselves on the meager wages they obtained in the burgeoning factories of Birmingham , Manchester , Leeds, Liverpool, and Sheffield .

London, now one of the largest cities of Europe , became, during the dissolute regency and reign of George IV, a scene for conspicuous consumption and lavish foppery of 'dandies' , like Beau Brummel.

In 1815, Parliament passed The Corn Laws to support the domestic price of grain. Food grew more expensive for the working poor as well as for the industrial classes. The new law directly supported the position of the landed aristocrats still controlling Parliament. It generated two related movements: that to repeal the Corn Laws and the Liberal Free Trade movement, known by the French expression 'Laissez faire' - literally meaning, 'leave it alone'.

In the latter, the principles of Bentham and Adam Smith were to free the expanding manufacturing and trading interests from irritating and inefficient governmental restraints. Industrialism had caused a rift between factory owners and workers, competing for the fruits of their work, with the early victories all to the owners. Some enlightened manufacturers like Robert Owen at New Lanark introduced more co-operative methods which did not spread, but did provide a precedent for later British socialism. The 'two nations' which Disraeli later described had formed. In 1819, at a radical meeting in Manchester , an uneasy guard shot into the crowd of 60,000, and the Peterloo Massacre (killing 11 and wounding 400) exemplified the tension in the air.

Dissenters and non-conformists,15percent of the population, received recognition as political equals in 1828. The Roman Catholic Relief Act, with the help of the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, became law in 1829.

Town government was overhauled; Sir Robert Peel pressed for metropolitan police forces to put down crime; the frequent rioting in the cities over the Corn Law had frightened the middle and upper classes.

Parish administration of the Poor Laws gave way to regional groups which put up workhouses to house the poor, and make them productively spin and weave. Borough councils were set up to help local justices of the peace deal with social welfare. The success was mixed, and the failures of these reforms were pilloried in Dickens’ brilliant 'Oliver Twist'.

The most spectacular reform of all was the great Reform Bill of 1832. The franchise was extended and seats were re-distributed to redress the 70-year long imbalance of population and political representation. The new middle classes in the cities obtained a share in political power. Further extensions of the voting system would come later.

So when young Victoria became queen in 1837, a spirit of ferment pervaded England . New material wealth demanded political accommodation to drive England forward into its great industrial and imperial age.

Social Change from Queen Victoria until now.

London, now one of the largest cities of Europe , became, during the dissolute regency and reign of George IV, a scene for conspicuous consumption and lavish foppery of 'dandies' , like Beau Brummel.

Mid-Victorian Empire, 1837-1874.

In the early years of Victoria' s reign, reforms on several fronts, coupled with the steady and dramatic expansion of national wealth resting on England' s industrial empire, set the tone for the next generation.

The Reform Bill of 1832 had left working-men still unsatisfied with their non-existent role in national politics in spite of their growing economic importance. Robert Owen's experiments in industrial reform had not widely been taken up to encourage trade unionism beyond New Lanark. Poorer workers and their families still faced the prospect of hunger, and they blamed their sorry position on the protectionist policies of the Corn Laws.

William Lovett, in order to focus worker discontent and agitate for reform, formed the London Working Men's Association in 1836. In 1838, he and Francis Place wrote the 'People's Charter', demanding manhood suffrage and an end to property qualifications for parliamentary office. Supporters of 'Chartism' held a huge mass demonstration in Westminster Palace yard, in the spring of 1839, to present a petition urging Parliament to adopt its reforms. The House of Commons rejected the petition in July. In spite of local strikes and riots, no mass movement was kindled, and over the next decade, Chartism faded away.

Meanwhile, members of the intelligentsia, liberals and radicals alike, pressed for free trade unencumbered with parliamentary favoritism. Cobden and Mill urged the repeal of the Corn Laws, and in 1846, Sir Robert Peel managed to accomplish this, though it cost him his ministry.

In this time of quickening reform, a series of disastrous harvests during the 1840s, especially in Ireland , where virtually the entire potato crop failed in 1846, and again in 1847, forced many British and Irish to migrate to Crown colonies or the United States . This relieved slightly the pressure of a booming population on Britain' s economic resources.

Those who stayed behind could see, early in Victoria' s reign, a British society grown increasingly self-confident of its national destiny, from its industrial riches, its galaxy of colonies, its enlightened and rational philosophers. The Victorians monumentalized themselves in the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations - it was Albert, Queen Victorias husband's idea.

The growing prosperity of England made it the 'workshop of the world', ahead of all other European nations and America in industry, commerce, and foreign trade. I t produced one-half of the world's iron; by 1870, England' s foreign trade exceeded that of France , and Italy put together.

Not everyone lavished such unbridled congratulatory praise upon themselves. Victorian England was as self-critical as it was self-congratulatory. The great genius, Charles Dickens, wrote brilliantly of the shortcomings of England during this age: 'Bleak House', 'Little Dorritt', 'Nicholas Nickleby', Oliver Twist', 'The Pickwick Papers, and 'Martin Chuzzlewit' pilloried the pomp of peers and the crass materialism of many in the middle classes. Dickens wrote with great sympathy for the poor, and at times exploded in rage at their condition. Thousands of readers waited for his newest serial every month; he competed with the social realism of Anthony Trollope, whose 'Barchester Chronicles' highlighted many of the social problems of the day. Thomas Carlyle wrote stingingly of the gulf between the rich and poor, "the dandies and drudges", John Stuart Mill, pressed for political reforms like extended suffrage, better education. 'Anarchy', published in 1869, savagely criticised Victorian materialism, splitting British society into three classes: Barbarians (the peerage), Philistines (the commercial middle classes), and the Populace. In 1859, Charles Darwin's 'Origin of Species', widely attacked as blasphemous at the time, stirred currents not fully felt until later, that Victorian man - this most noble of all the creatures that God had created, - was a close cousin to monkeys.

Gladstone and Disraeli

William Gladstone, the great Liberal leader, made Britain the continuing champion of democracy abroad (even if pure democracy remained out of the question at home).

Gladstone, who traded jobs with Disraeli very frequently, also swept through the bureaucracy of national administration, and reformed the civil service, the military and the judicial system. Civil Service Commissoners had been established in 1855 to examine candidates and to make merit-based appointments. This ended the system of government patronage that had prevailed in various forms since the days of the Saxon kings and, indeed, had established the foundation of English politics.

Lord Chancellor Selborne(1872-1874) streamlined England's judges in the same spirit as Cardwell modernized the army: he reunited the law and equity courts, separated for centuries, and established the tripartite division of courts: King's Bench, Chancery and Probate, Divorce and Admiralty - under the supervision of the House of Lords acting as the Court of Appeal.

England also reformed its education and public health policies. Commissions enquired into the state of water supplies and sewage facilities, and the Local Government Board (which became, in 1919, the Ministry of Health), saw to urban clean-up. The Education Act of 1870 set up local school boards and made primary education compulsory for children under 13 years old. In 1891, school fees were abolished for elementary schools.

Arrival of the Unions

These changes affected the growing numbers of English: by 1871, London had well over 3 million residents and a ring of well-developed suburbs. Although laborers, there and elsewhere, worked 60-hour weeks, their position had improved substantially from the hellish conditions of the early century. Limits were placed on work hours of women and children, and the Factory Acts regulated the physical conditions of the factories, (which Dickens had portrayed in Hard Times about an earlier generation). Factories grew in size and their ownership changed.

London became the hub of finance for Britain and the world as investment poured out of Britain and overseas both to colonies and the United States.

In 1869, the Trades Union Congress began successfully to press for more protection of unions, secured in the Trade Union Act of 1871. The workers also turned, to self-help. Their Cooperative Movement, in which working men banded together to buy and distribute produce and consumer goods to themselves on a large scale, counted over 800,000 members by 1890. And by 1890, these workers' movements had joined into a national political party for working men: the Labour Party.

However, the Victorian golden age began to wane. The rate of industrial expansion slowed after 1870, as more capital was sent overseas to the colonies in the hope of a better investment return on foreign investment re-invested abroad. Germany began to compete with British manufactured goods, as did America, especially in iron and steel.

By 1875, Britain had to import half of its wheat, as it devoted more resources to industry and less to agriculture, and this percentage continued to increase. The financial crisis in Europe and America in 1873 and 1874 marked a change in Britain's world economic position and it's history.

Later Victorian Years

The social classes of England changed dramatically in the second half of Victoria's reign. Population shifted to the cities. By 1911, London, southeast Lancashire, the West Midlands, West Yorkshire, Merseyside, and central Clydeside all had populations well in excess of 1 million. Meanwhile, the urban working class continued to expand and grow more prosperous, as real wages doubled between 1860 and 1914, although inflation eroded some of those gains.

The middle class split into tiers. The lower middle class of clerks in the banking and government agencies, lived in suburbs like Croydon, in row after row of identical houses and typically read the Daily Mail. The upper middle class also split once again, into the professional middle class - doctors, lawyers, churchmen, and higher civil servants-mostly educated at the universities and public schools, and the commercial middle class -manufacturers and businessmen, who emulated the professionals in their living situations and in educating their children. Typically, after the classical curriculum of the schools, these children had no taste for manufacturing and increasingly moved out of production and into banking and other service industries. The aristocracy and gentry were affected least by the new industrial economy. They occupied the most prominent positions in Parliament and the Army, and they recouped their agricultural losses after 1870 with increasingly diverse investments, especially in growing urban property values.

More Complaints about Life.

In1906, a Liberal-Labour coalition captured Parliament. Herbert Asquith became Prime Minister in 1908, and pushed through free school meals for children, old age pensions, and the Development Act. Liberal David Lloyd George got passed a National Insurance Bill in 1911, giving workmen insurance in times if illness and unemployment, paid for by workers, employers, and the government. Victorian self-help was dead and the British Liberals finally acknowledged the defects of laissez-faire liberalism, although no underlying lack of faith in capitalism animated most of the reformers.

A series of strikes, including the serious Railway Strike of 1911, demonstrated that workmen still demanded more of the nation's pile of wealth. The young Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, gained great notoriety for his unsympathetic attitude to the strikers. Ireland's continuing serious disorders threatened civil war.

Victorian Age Aflame: the Explosion of World War

Recritment of enthusiastic volunteers supplied troops until 1916 when, for the first time, able-bodied men from age 18 to 45 were conscripted and sent to France . Meanwhile at home, thousands of women operated the munitions and material factories with massive government intervention (under the Ministry of Munitions which Lloyd George directed). The government organized the entire national economy on a war footing in this first modern 'all out war', so very different from the rather isolated engagements of gentlemen and their retainers of medieval and early modern times. World War One was the first mass war.

In June, 1916, the British launched an offensive on the Somme and lost 60,000 men on the first day and over 420,000 men by the end of the offensive. In August and September, 1917, at Passchendaele , Britain lost 300,000 men; thousands drowned in the mud of Flanders . By war's end, 750,000 men had died and 2,500,000 were wounded, many permanently disabled. Never before and not yet since has Britain lost so many people in combat in one war.

The carnage cost Britain half of its generation of young men. As a result of war , women re-gained the status they had not had since Saxon times. They entered a wide range of clerical and administrative jobs previously open only to men. In 1918, the Representation of the People Act gave the vote to all women over 30 years of age.

Coping with a Shattered Europe

The post -World War One years were difficult for victorious but exhausted Britain .

Then, the industrial and economic unrest of the working classes, suffering dramatically from their displacement following the full employment and production of the war years, vented itself in the Great Strike of 1926. Baldwin 's government had refused to continue to subsidize the declining mining industry and prompted virtually all the unions into a nine-day relatively non-violent general strike. During this time liberal Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates took holidays from the university to drive buses and operate other services, like police, necessary for the public safety. But then, suddenly, the Trades Union Congress called off the strike; it was a total defeat for workers, especially miners. The closest thing Britain had ever seen to open class war came to an abrupt and bloodless end. However, the display of worker solidarity, although brief, revealed the deep fissures of class division in Britain and created a new suspicion of workers for owners, especially among the miners.

The remainder of the decade passed with increasing despair for many poorer workers, in both industrial and agriculture, as the prosperity of rural Britain continued to erode to troublesome new depths. With falling farm prices, many small farmers were caught in a debilitating cycle of debt to buy seed. Money from crop sales was used to pay off the debt, with crop failure of low farm prices frequently leading to foreclosure. Pollution added to the squalor in industrial communities like Jarrow, Merthyr Tydfil,and Wigan . These industrial towns had higher infant mortality, much higher frequency of tuberculosis (TB), and a shorter life expectancy among their residents than did commercial areas in the south and east. Two-thirds of the nation's wealth was held by less than one percent of the population.

Economic Collapse and the Menace of Foreign Fascism

Ramsay MacDonald (briefly prime minister in 1924) became prime minister again in 1929 in a spirit of reform. But in October, the American stock market crashed, with its ripple effect dragging the British economy into the downward spiral. By 1932, unemployment reached 3 million, with a vast burden on the government to pay social insurance. British industrial structure, depending on coal, steel, textiles, and shipping, was in a weak position with respect to world competition. British industry had low capital investment, was overmanned, and inefficient. Germany swept from debauchery to debauchery in the hyper-inflationary and dissolute 1920s, with a ruined economy broken by reparations from the war,and a national pride smoldering over the terms of the Peace which greatly restricted it from developing an army or the industrial Ruhr .

Discontent put Adolf Hitler, a nationalist and fascist, into office with the National Socialist (Nazi) party in 1933, and war became simply a matter of time as Hitler seized first Austria and then the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Chamberlain went to negotiate with Hitler at Berchtesgaden , Bad Godesberg, in September, and essentially caved into Hitler's expansionist foreign policy, returning to Britain with the soon to be disproved, declaration that he had secured 'peace in our time'. In March, 1939, Hitler invaded Prague , and public opinion, in a fury, demanded that Chamberlain end his acquiescent policy toward the Third Reich. Chamberlain engaged to protect Poland were it invaded; Hitler invaded Poland on Sept.1, 1939, and Britain declared war on Germany two days later. The public mood was less expansive but perhaps more stern than in World War One; social tensions were temporarily suppressed as the entire British Empire now mobilized itself to defend against the menace of continental fascism. In the spring of 1940, Hitler occupied France . The invasion of England for the first time since Napoleon threatened, seemed imminent.

In May, 1940, Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill headed a government which Labor and Liberals joined, creating a coalition. He embodied the dogged determination of Imperial Britain to thwart the Germans, and his regular radio addresses mustered public opinion squarely behind him. His 'We'll fight them on the beaches...' speach is probably the most famous speach made by a British Politician.

By mid-August, the Blitzkreig had begun the Battle of Britain as the Luftwaffe attacked in nightly bombing raids intended to weaken the countryside before a massive land invasion. Attacks began on airfields and airplane factories and then expanded to London , Bristol, Coventry , Plymouth , Liverpool, Hull , Swansea and other cities. Meanwhile the Royal Air Force dispatched Spitfires and Hurricanes to harry the attackers during the autumn. By Christmas, the threat of immediate invasion subsided, although the Blitz continued, eventually resulting in 60,000 civilian deaths during the war.

Beginning in 1941, the 'Lend Lease' arrangement with the United States ensured a steady supply of war materials. Britain focused its attentionfirst on protecting its middle Eastern interests, and in 1942, Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery routed his German counterpart, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, at El Alamein to drive the Germans from North Africa. In the following year, a beachhead was established in the dissolving fascist regime of Benito Mussolini in Italy. In the east, after the disastrous loss of Singapore, Britain halted the Japanese assault on Burma (Myanmar). Finally, in June 1944, the British and Americans opened a European land war in France with the invasion of Normandy.

It was only a matter of time before the Third Reich capitulated in May, 1945. only 270,000 British died, roughly one-third the casualties from the previous World War.

Once again, war needs resulted in centralization of the economy. This time, however, the intervention would be more long-term, as a new sense of egalitarianism swept through Britain , resulting from common hardships like rationing and the Blitz. Full wartime employment had kindled new faith in central government planning.

The Beveridge Report of 1942 proposed a comprehensive national system of social security, maternity and child benefits, all to be financed through graduated central taxation. Beveridge also urged implementation of a national health and unemployment insurance system and old age pensions. The Uthwatt and Barlow Reports proposed schemes to revivify industry and agriculture. The Treasury followed the recommendations of Lord Keynes, now one of its officers. Nationalization of major industries and the Bank of England was proposed. The Butler Education Act of 1944 provided a new comprehensive system of education on the primary, secondary, and technical levels. And in the summer of 1945, this social spirit caused the fall of the Churchill coalition. Labour swamped the Conservatives, and Clement Atlee became prime minister in a nation that, now that the war was over, found the imperialistic Churchill, although admired and revered, not the man to lead Britain in the social era now underway.

Experimenting with prosperity

Clement Atlee's government (1945-1951) now launched a program of social democracy founded on a mixed economy of public and private sectors to make Britain a Welfare State. The nationalization of industry proposed during the war now became a reality: the coal, railways, aviation, gas, electric, and telephone industries were nationalized, as was the Bank of England. Aneurin Bevan in 1946 proposed the National Health Service and it took effect in 1948, making medical care 'free' for all citizens.

National insurance was put into effect in 1946; child allowances were raised, as was the age at which a child could leave school. The government began to revitalize depressed industrial areas like Wales , Durham , Cumberland , and central Scotland . The trade unions, anxious to give social welfare a chance, accepted wage freezes with relatively little complaint. Gladstone' s liberalism had seemingly vanished from its old stronghold, the British government.

Of course, some post-war industrial and economic dislocation was inevitable, as was the difficulty in managing the war debt which had blown up like a balloon to unprecedented levels. Rationing of scarce commodities and consumer goods did not end until nine years after the war. Wages in general for non-union workers rose and the growth of mass leisure activities, like professional sports and commercial movies, marked a more expansive life than many had ever known. 'The Festival of Britain', held in 1951 to mark the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851, led to the revitalization of the South Bank of the Thames in Landon.

Tories regained power in 1951 under Churchill and held it uninterruptedly, under Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and Sir Alec Douglas-Home, until 1964, but they allowed Atlee's social welfare policies to grow freely.

Good-Bye to the Old Time Empire

The two decades following World War Two contained the final dissolution of the worldwide British Empire as one colony after another gained political independence from Britain . The Atlee government granted independence to India , Pakistan , Burma , and Ceylon between 1947 and 1949. This was the alternative to the increasing fiscal and political burden of maintaining British authority by force in the face of various nationalisms ever more articulate in figures like Ghandi in India .

Territories in East and West Africa gained independence in the 1950s; the Central Africa Federation broke up in 1963 and resulted in independence for Zambia and Malawi . Only Honduras , the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Aden , Fiji , and a few other isolated places remained under direct British rule. Other British territories or protectorates ended in the middle East and the far East. Britain , meanwhile, has seen its policies ever more closely entwined with those of the United States in foreign affairs; the present NATO alliance dates from 1949.

In Europe , new efforts were made to arrange economic affairs on Europe-wide basis, but Britain's effort to join European Common Market was rebuffed by Charles deGaulle in 1963. British public opinion never really supported such a move in the face of historical insularity. Britain finally entered the European Economic Community in 1973.

Slower growth and declining productivity worried few, but academic economists as the typical household, with fewer children, grew more affluent in an increasingly comfortable consumer society. More families had cars, and many could afford annual vacations on the Mediterranean coast.

Welfare State Under Siege

Such expansive and prosperous times were not to last. During Harold Wilson's Labour government (1964-1970), many of the simmering difficulties of Britain emerged in more open conflict. Young people, as their counter-parts elsewhere in Europe and the United States , protested the bland conformity of their society. They gave their energy to the growing protest over nuclear armaments, first in 1985 at the Aldermaston Marches from Trafalgar Square to the Aldermaston weapons research center in Berkshire , 50 miles ( 80km ) away. The movement gradually grew into the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, advocating unilateral abandonment of nuclear weapons in Great Britain .

Welsh and Scottish nationalists mobilized for a greater voice to be given their indigenous cultures; people from all over Great Britain began widespread movements for greater ecological concern and protection of the natural environment from the ravage of industrial waste.

Ethnic immigrants from India and Pakistan faced prejudice limiting their access to housing, education, and jobs. Catholics and Protestants in Ulster fought savagely new political settlements; the IRA used terrorist tactics to press its political goals, with bombings, assassination, and riot as some of its chief political techniques.

Now, too, the economic fabric of the social welfare state began to unravel, as the British learned that their declining productivity and flat growth could not support the increasing burdens placed upon them by the economically unproductive and society at large. Balance of payment crises prompted a devaluation of the pound in 1967, and the Conservative ministry of Edward Heath (1970-1974) fueled inflation with a foolishly expansive monetary policy, hoping to generate money to pay the country's ballooning welfare costs. Steady declines in Britain's share of world economic markets resulted in increased unemployment after 1973, and with it, increased social unrest.

Declining living standards, resulting from inflation and a decline in real purchasing power, prompted dozens of strikes, especially in the mining industry, in 1972 and 1974. The second strike assisted the downfall of Heath's government and its replacement with the Labour government of Harold Wilson (1974-1976), which acceded to the miner's demands.

International energy prices sky-rocketing in 1973, hastened Britain's economic decline as its goods grew even less competitive, but this dark cloud had a silver lining in the renewed interest in discovering domestic energy sources, especially in the North Sea with natural gas. Since that time, Britain has become self-sufficient in energy, but any revenues generated from oil exports depend on the volatile price of petroleum in the world market.

To keep pace with rising prices, trade unions began to demand wage increases of 30 percent per year. Inflation peaked at 20 percent in 1980. By 1980, unemployment had risen to 2,000,000, a total not previously reached since the 1930s. The labour government of James Callaghan (1976-1979) tried to defuse union pressures with job protection in return for relaxed wage demands, but a series of strikes in 1978-1979 brought the electorate to the end of its tether and Margaret Thatcher - Great Britain's first woman prime minister - and the Conservatives were swept back into office.

Thatcher had to cope with mounting tension over unemployment and nationalist protests in Wales and Scotland as well as the continuing violence of the IRA. For a time in 1981, in the same summer as the world-televised Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, racial tension burst into the open in the Toxteth and Brixton riots.

Withdrawal from the Empire continued as Thatcher's government granted full self-government to Zimbabwe in 1979 but vestigial Imperialism gained a torrent of public approval when, after Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in the spring of 1982. Britain dispatched a task force of 10,000 troops over 8,000 miles ( 12,800km ) to the south Atlantic to restore British sovereignty to the tiny islands. This resulted in massive public adulation of Thatcher, as dreams of the old Empire sparkled briefly back to life in a popular consciousness tried of domestic difficulties.

After the Falklands War, Britain returned quickly to the perennial unrest of the past 20 years. Consensus seemed to have hidden itself, as Tony Benn, of the Labour Party, has urged a grass-roots return to socialism and counter Thatcher's hard line policy against further concessions to unions. The Conservative mandate in 1983 against a declining Labour party no doubt reinforced Thatcher's economic policies. Thatcher broke the back of the miners in 1984-1985 as their strike, under the direction of Arthur Scargill, shattered, leaving many to question the future of trade union power in Great Britain .

Recent trends in Britain under the leadership of Tony Blair's 'New Labour', with a closer alliance with the United States than many would like, their controversial involvement with the US in the Iraq wars, allegations of corruption, sleeze - that is the unsavoury if not illegal behaviour of MP's and Government Ministers, make the future marvelously and unfortunately, unpredictable.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Britain's incomparably rich and variegated past is its generally evolutionary political change, compared with Continental Europe , in spite of sharply-felt and expressed discontents. Even the great revolutions of the 17^th Century occupied relatively few members of the population and were essentially conservative reactions. As for the medieval civil wars, they too, concerned a relatively narrow stratum of the population. During the Civil War of the mid 17th century, a farm labourer is recorded as having remarked, 'What? Has they two fallen out then?'

Parliament: The Cabinet & Ministers.

Her Majesty's Government is the body of ministers responsible for the conduct of national affairs. The Prime Minister is appointed by the Queen. He is also, by tradition, First Lord of the Treasury and Minister for the Civil Service. By modern convention, the Prime Minister always sits in the House of Commons. The Prime Minister receives an annual salary, and his official residence is No. 10 Downing Street in London. The Prime Minister presides over the Cabinet, is responsible for the allocation of functions among ministers and informs the Queen at regular meetings of the general business of the Government.

Minister are appointed by Queen on the recommendation of the Prime Minister. The most senior ministers (usually about 20) compose the Cabinet, which meets under the chairmanship of the Prime Minister for a few hours each week to decide government policy on major issues. Ministers are responsible collectively to Parliament for all Cabinet decisions; individual Ministers are responsible to Parliament for the work of their departments.

The Privy Council

The Privy Council was formerly the chief source of executive power in the State; its origins can be traced back to the King's Council (or Court), which in the 13th century gave the sovereign private 'privy' advice on the government of the country. It remained powerful until the 18th century when most of its work was taken over by the Cabinet.

Today its role is largely formal, advising the sovereign to approve certain government decrees, so-called 'orders-in-council' and issuing Royal Proclamations.

Government Departments and the Civil Service

Government departments and their agencies are the main instruments for implementing government policy when Parliament has passed the necessary legislation, and for advising ministers.

The principal Government departments include: the Treasury; the House Office; the Foreign and Commonwealth Office; the Overseas Development Administration; the Department for Education; the Department of the Environment; the Department of Health; the Department of National Heritage; the Social Security Department; the Department of Employment; the Ministry of Agriculure, Fisheries and Food; the Department of Trade and Industry; the Department of Transport; the Office of Telecommunications; the Lord Chancellor's Department; the Ministry of Defence; and nine Scottish Departments responsible to the Secretary of State for Scotland. What a biring list!

Since the British Government's assumption of direct responsibility for Northern Ireland in 1972, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has been the Cabinet Minister responsible for Northern Ireland affairs. The work of the nine Northern Ireland departments is subject to the direction and control of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

The government departments are staffed by members of the Civil Service, whose duty is to assist in carrying out the administration of laws passed by Parliament. Changes of Government do not involve changes in departmental staff, who continue to carry out the duties whichever party is in power. Civil servants are recruited mainly by competitive examination.

There were 541,800 civil servants in January, 1994. About half of all civil servants are engaged in the provision of public services. These include paying sickness benefits and pensions, collecting taxes and contributions, running employment services, staffing prisons, and providing services to industry and agriculture. A quarter are employed in the Ministry of Defence. The rest are divided between central administrative and policy duties; servicewide support services, such as accommodation, printing and information; and largely financially self-supporting services, for instance, those provided by the Department for National Savings and the Royal Mint.

The total number includes about 48,000 'industrial' civil servants, mainly manual workers in government industrial establishments. Four-fifths of civil servants work outside London. Responsibility for central coordination and management of the Civil Service is Divided between the Treasury and the Cabinet Office (Office of Public Service and Science).

The diplomatic service is a separate service, with its own structure, linked to that of the Home Civil Service. This service of some 45,00 or so people, provides the majority of the staff for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and at British diplomatic missions and consular posts abroad.

The local authorities run many of the public services. County councils provide large-scale services, while district councils are responsible for the more local ones. At present in England, county councils are responsible for strategic planning, transport planning, highways, traffic regulation, education, consumer protection, refuse disposal, police, the fire service, libraries and personal social services. District councils are responsible for environmental health, housing and refuse collection. In carrying out their duties, local authorities must act in accordance with, and within the limits of, powers conferred on them by Parliament; they are also subject to a certain amount of supervision by the central Government. Nevertheless, they remain independent bodies, and discharge their responsibilities in their own right. They also appoint and control their own staff.

Local government expenditure accounts for about 25 per cent of public spending.

Local government capital expenditure is financed primarily by borrowing and from capital receipts from the disposal of land and buildings. Local authorities in Great Britain raise revenue through the council tax.

Parliament & Elections.

The United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy: the head of State is a King or a Queen. In practice, the Sovereign reigns, but does not rule. The United Kingdom is governed, in the name of the Sovereign, by His or Her Majesty's Government - a body of Ministers who are the leading members of whichever Political arty the electorate has voted into office, and who are responsible to Parliament.

The system of parliamentary government is not based on a written constitution. There is no written constitution in the United Kingdom. The British constitution is not set out in any single document. It is made up of Statute Law, Common Law and Conventions (conventions are rules and practices which are not legally enforceable but which are regarded as indispensable to the working of government). The Judiciary determines Common Law and interprets the Statutes.

The United Kingdom is a unitary, not a federal, State. All four countries of the kingdom are represented in the Parliament at Westminster (London). The term "parliament" originally meant a meeting for 'parley' (a French word which means 'to speak') or discussion. Parliament consists of the Sovereign, the House of Lords and the House of Commons. The there elements meet together only on occasions of symbolic significance, such as the State Opening of Parliament, when the House of Commons are summoned by the Queen to the House of Lords.

The main functions of Parliament are:

- to pass laws;

- to provide, by voting for taxation, the means of carrying on the work of government;

- to examine government policy and administration, including proposal for expenditure; and

- to debate the major issues of the day.

A Parliament has a maximum duration of five years, but in practice general elections are usually held before the end of this term. The life of a Parliament is divided into sessions. Each usually last for one year - normally beginning and ending in October or November. There are 'adjournments' at night, at weekends, at Christmas, Easter and the late Spring Bank Holiday, and during a long summer break usually starting in late July. Some criticise the excessively long 'holiday' periods and late or all-night sessions which are often deemed to be ineffective due to MP's fatigue.

The Sovereign formally summons and dissolves Parliament and generally opens each new annual session with a speech from the throne.

The present Houses of Parliament were rebuilt between 1835 and 1857 after having been destroyed by fire and were designed by Sir Charles Barry on a classical plan with Gothic detailing by Augustus Welby Pugin. The public are admitted to the 'Stranger's Gallery' in the House of Lords (2:30 p.m. Mon, Tues and Wed, 3p.m. Thur, 11 a.m. Fri) and the 'Public Gallery' in the House of Commons (4:30 p.m. Mon-Thur, 9:30a.m. Fri). Secutity is often tight with access limited to the press or those by special invitation or permission.

The House of Lords

The House of Lords is made up of the Lords Spiritual and the Lords Temporal. The Lords Spiritual are the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and 24 senior Bishops of the Church of England. The Lords Temporal consist of all hereditary 'Peers' of England, Scotland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, but not peers of Ireland); Life Peers created to assist the House in its judicial duties Lords of Appeal; and all other Life Peers. The main function of the House of Lords is to bring the wide experience of its members into the process of lawmaking, some say... other disagree and say that it is just a 'club' for the rich and famous and is not relevant to modern government.

The House of Commons

The House of Commons is elected by universal adult suffrage - voting by the people, and consists of 651 Members of Parliament - MP's. Of the 651 seats: 524 are for England, 38 for Wales, 72 for Scotland, and 17 for Northern Ireland. Each member represents an area (or constituency), and holds his seat during the life of a Parliament. It is in the House of Commons that the ultimate authority for law-making resides.

Parliamentary Electoral System

Members of the House of Commons are elected either at a General Election, when all the seats are contested, or at a by-election held when an MP dies or resigns, or is given a peerage- sent to 'The Other Place' - The House of Lords. A General Election must be held every five years and is often held at more frequent intervals.

For electoral purposes Britain is divided into constituencies, each of which returns one member to the House of Commons. Elections are by secret ballot. British citizens, together with citizens of other Commonwealth countries and citizens of the Irish Republic resident in Britain, may vote provided they are: aged 18 or over, included in the annual register of electors for the constituency known as The Electoral Roll, andnot subject to any disqualification such as being imprisioned or insane.

Each elector may cast one vote, normally in person at a polling station. People entitled to an absent vote may vote by post or by proxy, although postal ballot papers cannot be sent to addresses outside Britain.

The British People.

The British are and always have been a rich mix of different peoples.

This is a historical truism that the British themselves are liable to forget. A special insularity has developed since the last of the great conqureors, the Normans, settled in the country in the 11th Century. The people of Britain since then, descendants of Normans, Celts, Saxons and many other Nordic tribes, have had nearly 1,000years to forge a common identity.

Racial differences have become an important issue again with the arrival in the past 30 years of dark-skinned immigrants from New Commonwealth countries in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Modern communications have enabled these later 'invaders' to travel vast distances in search of better job opportunities in the comparatively prosperous societies of the West.

The foreigners who came before them, many hundreds of years before, had in mind other objectives of conquest and plunder. They were from the neighboring landmass of Western Europe. Although each succeeding wave of invaders was in due course assimilated, differences remained in language, culture and outlook.

Traditionally, as we have seen, the original inhabitants of Britain are thought to have been Celts. But archaeologists have established that a Mediterranean people, the Iberians- from Iberia, Spain, lived in Britain before the Celts. It was they who founded the early villages of Winchester, Canterbury and London. More than 1,000 years were to lapse before the Celts arrived at about 2000BC. They too came from the south, from the Danube, France and the Alps. They were split into two branches. The Gaels withdrew to Ireland and Scotland. The Britons went to Cornwall and Wales. It is this Celtic ancestry that inspired the foundation of the Welsh and Scottish nationalist parties of modern Britain, particularly since the 1970's .

They promoted the revival of the old Celtic lanuages like Welsh and Gaelic. In Cornwall, where the old Celtic tradition still lingers, similar attempts are made from time to time to arouse nationalist passions. The people of Cornwall cherish their Cultural hritage and speak affectionately of their Breton cousins across the sea in Brittany, northern France.

Legend has it that the story of King Arthur and his knights was set in Cornwall. The story is certainly of Celtic inspiration and attempts are made periodically to find the ruins of Arthur's castle, Camelot, in Cornwall. Rugged and wild the ruins of a castle in the remote village of Tintagel, claim to be Arthurs seat. 'Arthur's Seat' is the rock where Edinburgh Castle stands in Scotland.

Set in the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey, Somerset, lies a stone plaque which reads something like 'Burial place of King Arthur'. Probably an early attempt by the Christian Church to boost tourism and their already bulging coffers. They already have a tree supposedly planted by Joseph of Arimethea, whose tomb it was that Jesus Chist's body was laid after the Crucifiction. Whatever the truth or otherwise, I see no harm in a little indulgence in romanticism of the dark, mysterious days of Arthur, Merlin and the rest.

The romans conquered the Celts, but ruled for the relatively brief period of 200 years before their empire collapsed and they fell prey to triumhpant power of the Angles and Saxons who emerged from the interiors oF Germany and Denmark.

The Anglo-Saxons, authors of the pagan epic 'Beowulf' and historical document 'The Anglo Saxon Chronicles', fore-runner of 'The Doomsday Book', grew fat on the land of England. They married the local Celtic women and settled down in the country of their adoption. As the years passed and they grew used to easy ways, they were no match for the penultimate wave of invaders, the Vikings and Danes, who arrived in their long boats and initially, sought only booty. But by the 9th Century the Vikings established their mastery of the seas, conquered London and established a permanent base on the shores of England.

William, Duke of Normandy, sensed the decline of Viking power by the 11th Century. His Norman soldiers, also descended from the Scadinavians, secured for him the thorone of Engalnd at the fateful 'Battle of Hastings' * in 1066.

'I William, hail all the citizens of london, France and England. I place you all under the protection of the law. I grant every child the right to inherit from his father upon the latter's death. I will not let anyone do you wrong. God be with you.' This was his procomation at his Coronation in Westminster Abbey, on Christmas Day, 1066.

Each group left behind memorials of their stay, whether in the shape of burial grounds, or else in literature, architecture, coinage and language. Norman castles that grace the Engish countryside reveal something about the society for whom they were built. The ruins of Stonehenge offer a tantalizing glimpse into the rituals of the Druids, the priests of the Celtic era. Even the Romans, who reigned so briefly, left a leagacy in their marvelous, straight roads built to facilitate the advance of their all-powerful army.

Tongues and Tradition

Language was another repository of the various legacies. Ancient tongues reverberate through the English that is spoken today. Ancient Celtic and Norse dialects, Anglo-Saxon, Latin and Norman French all mingled into a language pool from which mondern English evolved.

Both language and tradition can be a bridge to the past; both have given the British people a unique sense of their own history. Whole communities are proud of being British and prouder still of keeping that special quality that marks them out as different from other similar communities only a few miles away. The advent of radio and television has not blurred these distinctions.

The Class Divide

Superimposed on these differences of sub nationalism are class divisions resulting from the unequal distribution of wealth.

Government attempts to promote a fairer distribution of wealth have led to changes in class consciousness. Wealth, for example, is no longer regarded as a reliable guide to status. Nor are clothes. The young in particular delight in adopting whatever happens to be in fashion at the time, whether it is the hair style of the rastafarian or the outragrous battle dress of the former mods, rockers and punks.

The class divide is nevertheless still a power-ful force to be reckoned with. There is a residue of bitterness in the north which bore the brunt of the Industrial Revolution and where once mighty industries are now in decline.

The factorices spawned by the Inustrial Revolution would in due course attact another type of foreigner, different from the earlier conquerors, who came in search of betterjob opportunities. Since before the Industrial Age, Britain had become a haven for still other types of foreigners. These were political misfits in their own countries who saw in Britain's enlarged political freedoms a change to escape from persecution elsewhere. Their hope of finding sanctuary in the British Isles is now a firmly accepted part of political tradition. Successive British Government have felt impelled to give shelter to political refugees who would otherwise face death or imprisonment in their own countries.

A small corner of London mirrors the tradition of political and economic migration to this country. The area of Spitalfields lies close to the City of London and the Wharves and docks of East London. It is dominated today by Bangladeshis fleeing the poverty and strife of their crowded homeland. But 300years ago it was a center for Protestant HuGuenots from France who sought refuge in England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. They built the tall, thin and elegant town houses of which some still survive to this day. In the early 19th Century these refugees managed to build seven French churches. Local records show many family names of French origin until well into the 19th Century.

Between 1801 and 1901 the population of Spitalfields increased from 15,000 inhabitants to nearly 25,000. The reason was ,the influx of Jews fleeing from the pogroms of Eastern Europe. They started the Jewish Free School in 1817 and the small furriers and clothiers work shops that gradually supplanted the weaving trade.

The Chinese Connection And the Caribbean Connection

The other community of British Asians are also relative newcomers to this country, although their history of settlement stretches back at least 100 years. The Chinese from Hong Kong, like their compatriots from the subcontinent, live in the inner city areas of London, Bristol, Manchester, Cardiff, Liverpool and Glasgow. These communities have few industrialists or shopkeepers, but the Chinese have had enormous success with fast take-away food establishments and Chinese restaurants where the cuisine ranges from prosaic Cantoness dishes to exotic specialities from Sichuan.

Chinatown in London is in Soho, the heart of the West End. Restaurants there, with names like Dumpling Inn and Jade Garden, do a thriving business. Chinese visitors from overseas say some of the best Chinese food in the world can be found in Soho.

The Chinese who came to Britain in the 19th Century were merchant seamen recruited from Hong Kong. They settled in the major port cities, but were never more than a handful in number. Their tradition of serving in the merchant navy continues to this day. British Chinese merchant seamen were among those killed during the 1982 Falklands Islands campaign.

Most British Chinese have their origins in Hong Kong and surrounding territories. Their families started moving to Britain in large numbers after the collapse of Traditional agriculture in the Hong Kong New Territories.

Many of those who moved to Britain still have problems in adjusting to life in a cold European country. Contacts with non-Chinese are kept to a minimum because many of the old-style families prefer to remain in a closed self-contained community. Social workers seeking to make contact have time and again come up against the old Chinese proverb, 'Avoid entering a government office when alive and you will avoid hell when dead.'

The British Chinese are a relatively small ethnic minority. Their community is about a fifth the size of the West Indian counterpart from the Caribbean, who also arrived here in large numbers in the 1950s.

Unlike the Asians, they always saw Britain as the mother country, rich in opportunity and reward. The shock of social rejection, often expressed as racial discrimination, came as a much bigger surprise.

West Indian leaders summarized their feelings in a recent memorandum to a House of Commons Select Committee. 'As the descendants of former Slaves whose native and original culture has been ruthlessly suppressed, and its remnants systematically devalued, the generation of West Indians who migrated had been so psychologically anglicised... to feel and think of themselves as British and of Britain as their mother country,'

There is, incidently, a movement in Britain to recognise, acknowledge or apologise in cities such as Bristol and Liverpool for their involvement in the Slave Trade. But this is part of history and a legacy of Empire building, whether it comes from Britain, France, Spain, Holland or China under the Emperors. I accept that some recognition should be maintained in history books, museums and Art, but efforts would be better employed concentrating on problems that exist in the world today, rather than complaining about things consigned to 'History', about which no-one can change.

Times have changed since Britain was a land for plunder by foreign tribes. Celts, Romans, Vikings, Normans-all came here in search of booty. Each wave of invaders was absorbed and became part of the society it tried to exploit.

In time as a British identity evolved, the country acquired an empire of its own. The British empire has long since faded, but it led to an interaction with far flung peoples which is still going on. The nation now sees itself as a multi-racial society. Citizens of Asian and Caribbean decent now hold positions of power in both local and central government .

The new Britions are part of a continuing interaction between new arrivals and established residents. Like others before them, they too have had to blend in with the other tribes of Britain. It has all been seen before and recorded. Who are the British? Only history can give us a true answer.

AGRICULTURE

Industry is not always about making or manufacturing products or constructing buildings, bridges and roads. Agriculture is the industry of farming.

In Britain it varies from area to area. It is different from farming in China in two ways. It is generally more modernized. The crops are also different. We have already seen the improved techniques which happened 250 years ago during the agricultural revolution.

Farming is mostly of two types: arable farming (growing crops) or dairy farming (the production of cattle for milk which is used in food production for milk, butter & cheese.). Other animals are also reared for food , such as; sheep, pigs, goats, chicken and lots of other on a smaller scale.

China was one of the first countries in the world to study the Science of farming. Fourteen hundred years ago, Jia Sixie was born in Shanghai Province . He worked for the government. In his time off, he collected information, studied it and researched the experience of farmers. He studied the best ways to keep good quality seeds and how to improve soil conditions.

In about AD 545, he published a book which was studied by farmers for centuries. It included advice on growing vegetables and fruit trees, keeping cows and sheep and rearing fish in lakes. There are even instructions for making wine!

Advice from Jia Sixie¡¦s book 'Qi Min Yao Shu'...

- do things at the right time of the year. If you go against nature, you will have more work to do and the results will not be as good.

- improve your soil. Plough deeply the first time (Autumn)and less deeply in the Spring before planting and sowing.

- change (rotate) the crops in your fields each year and plant different crops next to each other in the same field and you will harvest good crops.

What do you understand by the following expressions?

--to harvest

-- irrigation..

--terraced land

Culture of the United Kingdom. 500+ links

The Proms is an eight-week summer season of daily orchestral classical music concerts held across the United Kingdom. The Last Night of the Proms celebrates British tradition with patriotic music of the United Kingdom.^[1]^[2]

The culture of the United Kingdom refers to the patterns of human activity and symbolism associated with the British people and the United Kingdom. It is informed by the UK's history as a developed island country, monarchy, imperial power and, particularly, as consisting of four countries—England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales—which each have their own preserved and distinctive customs and symbolism.

As a direct result of the British Empire, British cultural influence (such as the English language) can be observed in the language and culture of a geographically wide assortment of countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, South Africa, the United States, and the British overseas territories. These states are sometimes collectively known as the Anglosphere. As well as the British influence on its empire, the empire also influenced British culture, particularly British cuisine. Innovations and movements within the wider-culture of Europe have also changed the United Kingdom; Humanism, Protestantism, and representative democracy are borrowed from broader Western culture.

The Industrial Revolution, with its origins in the UK, brought about major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation, and had a profound effect on the socio-economic and cultural conditions of the world. Popular culture of the United Kingdom has impacted upon the world in the form of the British invasion, Britpop and British television broadcasting. British literature and British poetry, particularly that of William Shakespeare, is revered across the world.

The social structure of Britain has played a central cultural role throughout the history of British society. As a result of the history of the formation of the United Kingdom, the cultures of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are diverse and have varying degrees of overlap and distinctiveness.

Language

Main article: Languages in the United Kingdom

The United Kingdom has no official language. English is the main language and the de facto official language, spoken monolingually by an estimated 95% of the UK population.

However, individual countries within the UK have frameworks for the promotion of their indigenous languages. In Wales, English and Welsh are both widely used by officialdom, and Irish and Ulster Scots enjoy limited use alongside English in Northern Ireland, mainly in publicly commissioned translations. Additionally, the Western Isles council area of Scotland has a policy to promote Scottish Gaelic.

Under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which is not legally enforceable, the UK Government has committed itself to the promotion of certain linguistic traditions. Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Cornish are to be developed in Wales, Scotland and Cornwall respectively. Other native languages afforded such protection include: Irish in Northern Ireland; Scots in Scotland and Northern Ireland, where it is known in official parlance as "Ulster Scots" or "Ullans" but in the speech of users simply as "Scotch" or Broad Scots; and British Sign Language.

The Arts

Literature

A portrait of Sherlock Holmes by Sidney Paget from the Strand Magazine, 1891

Main article: British literature

The earliest existing native literature of the territory of the modern United Kingdom was written in the Celtic languages of the isles. The Welsh literary tradition stretches from the 6th century. Irish poetry also represents a more or less unbroken tradition from the 6th century to the present day, with the Ulster Cycle being of particular relevance to Northern Ireland.

Anglo-Saxon literature includes Beowulf, a national epic, but literature in Latin predominated among educated elites. After the Norman Conquest Anglo-Norman literature brought continental influences to the isles.

English literature emerged as a recognisable entity in the late 14th century, with the rise and spread of the London dialect of Middle English. Geoffrey Chaucer is the first great identifiable individual in English literature: his Canterbury Tales remains a popular 14th-century work which readers still enjoy today.

Following the introduction of the printing press into England by William Caxton in 1476, the Elizabethan era saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in the fields of poetry and drama. From this period, poet and playwright William Shakespeare stands out as arguably the most famous writer in the world.

The English novel became a popular form in the 18th century, with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1745).

After a period of decline, the poetry of Robert Burns revived interest in vernacular literature, the rhyming weavers of Ulster being influenced by literature from Scotland.

The following two centuries continued a huge outpouring of literary production. In the early 19th century, the Romantic period showed a flowering of poetry comparable with the Renaissance two hundred years earlier, with such poets as William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Lord Byron. The Victorian period was the golden age of the realistic English novel, represented by Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters (Charlotte, Emily and Anne), Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, George Eliot, Lord Alfred Tennyson and Thomas Hardy.

World War I gave rise to British war poets and writers such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Rupert Brooke who wrote (often paradoxically), of their expectations of war, and/or their experiences in the trench.

The Celtic Revival stimulated new appreciation of traditional Irish literature, however, with the independence of the Irish Free State, Irish literature came to be seen as more clearly separate from the strains of British literature. The Scottish Renaissance of the early 20th century brought modernism to Scottish literature as well as an interest in new forms in the literatures of Scottish Gaelic and Scots.

The English novel developed in the 20th century into much greater variety and was greatly enriched by immigrant writers. It remains today the dominant English literary form.

Other well-known novelists include Arthur Conan Doyle, D. H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Salman Rushdie, Mary Shelley, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Ian Fleming and J. K. Rowling.

Important poets include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, T. S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, John Milton, Alfred Tennyson, Rudyard Kipling, Alexander Pope, and Dylan Thomas.

Theatre

William Shakespeare, chief figure of the English Renaissance, is here seen in the Chandos portrait.

Aphra Behn was the first professional woman playwright.

The United Kingdom has a vibrant tradition of theatre. Theatre was introduced from Europe to what is now the United Kingdom by the Romans and auditoriums were constructed across the country for this purpose.

By the medieval period theatre had developed with the mummers' plays, a form of early street theatre associated with the Morris dance, concentrating on themes such as Saint George and the Dragon and Robin Hood. These were folk tales re-telling old stories, and the actors travelled from town to town performing these for their audiences in return for money and hospitality. The medieval mystery plays and morality plays, which dealt with Christian themes, were performed at religious festivals.

The reign of Elizabeth I in the late 16th and early 17th century saw a flowering of the drama and all the arts. Perhaps the most famous playwright in the world, William Shakespeare, wrote around 40 plays that are still performed in theatres across the world to this day. They include tragedies, such as Hamlet (1603), Othello (1604), and King Lear (1605); comedies, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream (1594—96) and Twelfth Night (1602); and history plays, such as Henry IV, part 1—2. The Elizabethan age is sometimes nicknamed "the age of Shakespeare" for the amount of influence he held over the era. Other important Elizabethan and 17th-century playwrights include Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and John Webster.

During the Interregnum 1642—1660, English theatres were kept closed by the Puritans for religious and ideological reasons. When the London theatres opened again with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, they flourished under the personal interest and support of Charles II. Wide and socially mixed audiences were attracted by topical writing and by the introduction of the first professional actresses (in Shakespeare's time, all female roles had been played by boys). New genres of the Restoration were heroic drama, pathetic drama, and Restoration comedy. The Restoration plays that have best retained the interest of producers and audiences today are the comedies, such as William Wycherley's The Country Wife (1676), The Rover (1677) by the first professional woman playwright, Aphra Behn, John Vanbrugh's The Relapse (1696), and William Congreve's The Way of the World (1700). Restoration comedy is famous or notorious for its sexual explicitness, a quality encouraged by Charles II (1660–1685) personally and by the rakish aristocratic ethos of his court.

In the 18th century, the highbrow and provocative Restoration comedy lost favour, to be replaced by sentimental comedy, domestic tragedy such as George Lillo's The London Merchant (1731), and by an overwhelming interest in Italian opera. Popular entertainment became more important in this period than ever before, with fair-booth burlesque and mixed forms that are the ancestors of the English music hall. These forms flourished at the expense of legitimate English drama, which went into a long period of decline. By the early 19th century it was no longer represented by stage plays at all, but by the closet drama, plays written to be privately read in a "closet" (a small domestic room).

A change came in the late 19th century with the plays on the London stage by the Irishmen George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde and the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, all of whom influenced domestic English drama and vitalised it again.

Today the West End of London has a large number of theatres, particularly centred around Shaftesbury Avenue. A prolific composer of the 20th century Andrew Lloyd Webber has dominated the West End for a number of years and his musicals have travelled to Broadway in New York and around the world, as well as being turned into films.

The Royal Shakespeare Company operates out of Shakespeare's birthplace Stratford-upon-Avon in England, producing mainly but not exclusively Shakespeare's plays.

Important modern playwrights include Alan Ayckbourn, John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, and Arnold Wesker.

Music. Main article: Music of the United Kingdom

See also: Britpop, British Invasion, List of Britpop musicians, List of British blues musicians, and List of British pop musicians of the 1980s

Composers William Byrd, Thomas Tallis, John Taverner, John Blow, Henry Purcell, Edward Elgar, Arthur Sullivan, William Walton, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett have made major contributions to British music, and are known internationally. Living composers include John Tavener, Harrison Birtwistle, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Oliver Knussen, John Rutter, Joby Talbot, David Arnold and James MacMillan.

The United Kingdom also supports a number of major orchestras including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonia, the London Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. London is one of the world's major centres for classical music : it holds several important concert halls and is also home to the Royal Opera House, one of the world's leading opera houses. British traditional music has also been very influential abroad.

The UK was one of the two main countries in the development of rock music, and has provided bands including The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Queen, Elton John, David Bowie, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Deep Purple, Status Quo, The Smiths, Sex Pistols, The Clash, Manic Street Preachers, Stereophonics, Duran Duran, The Jam, Muse, Placebo, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Jamiroquai, Oasis, Blur, Radiohead, Snow Patrol, The Libertines and Coldplay. It has provided inspiration for many modern bands today, including Kaiser Chiefs, Bloc Party, Babyshambles, Editors, Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand. Since then it has also pioneered various forms of electronic dance music including acid house, drum and bass and trip hop, all of which were in whole or part developed in the United Kingdom. Acclaimed British dance acts include Underworld, Orbital, Massive Attack, The KLF, The Prodigy, Basement Jaxx, The Chemical Brothers, Groove Armada, Aphex Twin and Portishead.

Broadcasting. Main articles: Cinema of the United Kingdom, Radio in the United Kingdom, and Television in the United Kingdom

The UK has been at the forefront of developments in film, radio, and television.

Many important films have been produced in the UK over the last century, and a large number of significant actors and film-makers have emerged. Currently the main film production centres are at Shepperton and Pinewood Studios.

Broadcasting in the UK has historically been dominated by the BBC, although independent radio and television (ITV, Channel 4, Five) and satellite broadcasters (especially BSkyB) have become more important in recent years. BBC television, and the other three main television channels are public service broadcasters who, as part of their license allowing them to operate, broadcast a variety of minority interest programming. The BBC and Channel 4 are state-owned, though they operate independently.

The United Kingdom has a large number of national and local radio stations which cover a great variety of programming. The most listened to stations are the five main national BBC radio stations. BBC Radio 1, a new music station aimed at the 16-24 age group. BBC Radio 2, a varied popular music and chat station aimed at adults is consistently highest in the ratings. BBC Radio 4, a varied talk station, is noted for its news, current affairs, drama and comedy output as well as The Archers, its long running soap opera, and other unique programmes. The BBC, as a public service broadcaster, also runs minority stations such as BBC Asian Network, BBC 1xtra and BBC 6 Music, and local stations throughout the country.

List of British radio channels

List of British television channels

Visual art

Main article: Art of the United Kingdom

The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up is an oil painting executed in 1838, by J. M. W. Turner (c.1775–1851). The experience of military, political and economic power from the rise of the British Empire, led to a very specific drive in artistic technique, taste and sensibility in the United Kingdom.^[3]

The oldest art in the United Kingdom can be dated to the Neolithic period, and is found in a funerary context. But it is in the Bronze age that the first innovative artworks are found. The Beaker people, who arrived in region around 2500 BC, were skilled in metal refining. At first, they worked mainly in copper, but around 2150 BC they learned how to make bronze. As there was a ready supply of tin in Cornwall and Devon, they were able to make take advantage of this new process. They were also skilled in the use of gold, and especially the Wessex culture excelled in the making of gold ornaments. Works of art placed in graves or sacrificial pits have survived, showing both innovation and high skill.

In the Iron Age, the Celtic culture spread in the British isles, and with them a new art style. Metalwork, especially gold ornaments, was still important, but stone and most likely wood was also used. This style continued into the Roman period, and would find a renaissance in the Medieval period. It also survived in the Celtic areas not occupied by the Romans, largely corresponding to the present-day Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

The Romans, arriving in the 1st century BC, brought with them the Classical style. Many monuments have survived, especially funerary monuments, statues and busts. They also brought glass work and mosaics. In the 4th century, a new element was introduced as the first Christian art was made in Britain. Several mosaics with Christian symbols and pictures have been preserved. The style of Romano-British art follows that of the continent, but there are some local specialities, to some extent influenced by Celtic art.

Roman rule was replaced by a number of kingdoms with different cultural backgrounds. The Celtic fringe gained back some of the power lost in the Roman period, and the Celtic style again became a factor influencing art all over the UK. Other peoples, such as the Saxons, Jutes and Danes, brought with them Germanic and Scandinavian art styles. Celtic and Scandinavian art have several common elements, such as the use of intricate, intertwined patterns of decoration. Leaving the debate over which style influenced the other most aside, it seems reasonable to say that in the UK the different style to some extent fused into a British Celtic-Scandinavian hybrid.

Anglo-Saxon sculpting was outstanding for its time in the 11th century, as proved by pre-Norman ivory carvings.^[4] Christianity, before the religion of parts of the Roman ruling class, started spreading among the peoples of the UK from the beginning of the 5th century. There was little change in the art style at first, but new elements were added. The Celtic high crosses are well-known examples of the use of Celtic patterns in Christian art. Scenes from the Bible were depicted, framed with the ancient patterns. Some ancient symbols were redefined, such as the many Celtic symbols that can easily be interpreted as referring to the Holy Trinity. One new form of art that was introduced was mural paintings. Christianity provided two elements needed for this art form to take root: Monks who were familiar with the techniques, and stone churches with white-chalked walls suitable for murals. As the artists were often foreign monks, or lay artists trained on the continent, the style is very close to that of continental art. Another art form introduced through the church was stained glass, which was also adopted for secular uses.

The English Renaissance, starting in the early 16th century, was a parallel to the Italian Renaissance, but did not develop in exactly the same way. It was mainly concerned with music and literature; in art and architecture the change was not as clearly defined as in the continent. Painters from the continent continued to find work in Britain, and brought the new styles with them, especially the Flemish and Italian Renaissance styles.

New York-born Sir Jacob Epstein was a pioneer of modern sculpture, boldly challenging taboos through his public works. As a reaction to abstract expressionism, pop art emerged originally in England at the end of the 1950s.

Notable visual artists from the United Kingdom include John Constable, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, William Blake and J.M.W. Turner. In the 20th century, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Bridget Riley, and the pop artists Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake were of note.

More recently, the Young British Artists have gained some notoriety, particularly Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.

Notable illustrators include Aubrey Beardsley, Roger Hargreaves, and Beatrix Potter.

Notable arts institutions include the Allied Artists' Association, Royal College of Art, Artists' Rifles, Royal Society of Arts, New English Art Club, Slade School of Art, Royal Academy, and the Tate Gallery.

Architecture

Main article: Architecture of the United Kingdom

Norman Foster's 'Gherkin' (2004) rises above the 13th century church St Helen's Bishopsgate in the City of London. The architecture of the United Kingdom is diverse.

Westminster Palace from across the River Thames

The Forth Railway Bridge is a cantilever bridge over the Firth of Forth in the east of Scotland. It was opened in 1890, and is designated as a Category A listed building.

The architecture of the United Kingdom has a long and diverse history from beyond Stonehenge to the designs of Norman Foster and the present day. In the United Kingdom, a listed building is a building or other structure officially designated as being of special architectural, historical or cultural significance. It is a widely used status, applied to around half a million buildings in the country.

The earliest remnants of architecture in what is now the United Kingdom are mainly neolithic monuments such as Stonehenge the Giant's Ring and Avebury, and Roman ruins such as the spa in Bath. Many castles remain from the medieval period and in most towns and villages the parish church is an indication of the age of the settlement, built as they were from stone rather than the traditional wattle and daub.

Over the two centuries following the Norman conquest of 1066, and the building of the Tower of London, many great castles such as Caernarfon Castle in Wales and Carrickfergus Castle in Ireland were built to suppress the natives. Large houses continued to be fortified until the Tudor period, when the first of the large gracious unfortified mansions such as the Elizabethan Montacute House and Hatfield House were built.

The Civil War 1642—49 proved to be the last time in British history that houses had to survive a siege. Corfe Castle was destroyed following an attack by Oliver Cromwell's army, but Compton Wynyates survived a similar ordeal. After this date houses were built purely for living, and design and appearance were forever more important than defence.

Just prior to the Civil War, Inigo Jones, who is regarded as the first significant British architect, came to prominence. He was responsible for importing the Palladian manner of architecture to the UK from Italy; the Queen's House at Greenwich is perhaps his best surviving work.

Following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the Great Fire of London in 1666 an opportunity was missed in London to create a new metropolitan city, featuring modern architectural styles. Although one of the best known British architects, Sir Christopher Wren, was employed to design and rebuild many of the ruined ancient churches of London, his master plan for rebuilding London as a whole was rejected. It was in this period that he designed the building that he is perhaps best known for, St Paul's Cathedral.

In the early 18th century baroque architecture—popular in Europe—was introduced, and Blenheim Palace was built in this era. However, baroque was quickly replaced by a return of the Palladian form. The Georgian architecture of the 18th century was an evolved form of Palladianism. Many existing buildings such as Woburn Abbey and Kedleston Hall are in this style. Among the many architects of this form of architecture and its successors, neoclassical and romantic, were Robert Adam, Sir William Chambers, and James Wyatt.

In the early 19th century the romantic medieval gothic style appeared as a backlash to the symmetry of Palladianism, and such buildings as Fonthill Abbey were built. By the middle of the 19th century, as a result of new technology, construction was able to develop incorporating steel as a building component; one of the greatest exponents of this was Joseph Paxton, architect of the Crystal Palace. Paxton also continued to build such houses as Mentmore Towers, in the still popular retrospective Renaissance styles. In this era of prosperity and development British architecture embraced many new methods of construction, but ironically in style, such architects as August Pugin ensured it remained firmly in the past.

At the beginning of the 20th century a new form of design arts and crafts became popular, the architectural form of this style, which had evolved from the 19th century designs of such architects as George Devey, was championed by Edwin Lutyens. Arts and crafts in architecture is symbolized by an informal, non symmetrical form, often with mullioned or lattice windows, multiple gables and tall chimneys. This style continued to evolve until World War II.

Following the Second World War reconstruction went through a variety of phases, but was heavily influenced by Modernism, especially from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Many bleak town centre redevelopments—criticised for featuring hostile, concrete-lined "windswept plazas"—were the fruit of this interest, as were many equally bleak public buildings, such as the Hayward Gallery. Many Modernist inspired town centres are today in the process of being redeveloped, Bracknell town centre being a case in point.

However, it should not be forgotten that in the immediate post-War years many thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of council houses in vernacular style were built, giving working class people their first experience of private gardens and indoor sanitation.

Modernism remains a significant force in UK architecture, although its influence is felt predominantly in commercial buildings. The two most prominent proponents are Lord Rogers of Riverside and Lord Foster of Thames Bank. Rogers' iconic London buildings are probably Lloyd's Building and the Millennium Dome, while Foster created the Swiss Re Buildings (aka The Gherkin) and the Greater London Authority H.Q.

Science and technology

Isaac Newton's Principia is one of the most influential works in the history of science.

A Watt steam engine, the steam engine that propelled the Industrial Revolution in Britain and the world.^[5]

From the time of the Scientific Revolution, England and Scotland, and thereafter the United Kingdom, have been prominent in world scientific and technological development. The English philosopher, Francis Bacon put forward his Baconian method in his 1620 book, Novum Organum. This method promoted empiricism and induction in scientific enquiry and was one of the driving forces behind the scientific revolution.

Possibly the most famous of all English scientists, Isaac Newton, is considered by historians of science to have crowned and ended the scientific revolution with the 1687 publication of his Principia Mathematica, which ushers in what is recognisable as modern physics. He is most famous for realising that the same force is responsible for movements of celestial and terrestrial bodies, that is gravity. It is commonly reported that he made this realisation when he was sitting underneath an apple tree and was hit on the head by a falling apple; this story is, however, apocryphal. He is also famous as the father of classical mechanics, formulated as his three laws and as the co-inventor (with Gottfried Leibniz) of differential calculus. Less famously, he also created the binomial theorem, worked extensively on optics, and created a law of cooling.

Since Newton's time, figures from the UK have contributed to the development of most major branches of science. Examples include Michael Faraday, who, with James Clerk Maxwell, unified the electric and magnetic forces in what are now known as Maxwell's equations; James Joule, who worked extensively in thermodynamics and is often credited with the discovery of the principle of conservation of energy; Paul Dirac, one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics; Charles Darwin, author of On the Origin of Species and discoverer of the principle of evolution by natural selection; Harold Kroto, the discoverer of buckminsterfullerene; William Thomson (Baron Kelvin) who drew important conclusions in the field of thermodynamics and invented the Kelvin scale of absolute zero; and the creator of Bell's Theorem, John Stewart Bell.

Historically, many of the UK's greatest scientists have been based at either Oxford or Cambridge University, with laboratories such as the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford becoming famous in their own right. In modern times, other institutions such as the Red Brick and New Universities are catching up with Oxbridge. For instance, Lancaster University has a global reputation for work in low temperature physics. The Royal Society serves as the national academy for sciences, with members drawn from many different institutions and disciplines. Formed in 1660, it is the oldest learned society still in existence.

Technologically, the UK is also amongst the world's leaders. Historically, it was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, with innovations especially in textiles, the steam engine, railroads and civil engineering. Famous British engineers and inventors from this period include James Watt, Robert Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Richard Arkwright.

Since then, the United Kingdom has continued this tradition of technical creativity. Alan Turing, Frank Whittle (inventor of the jet engine), Charles Babbage (who devised the idea of the computer) and Alexander Fleming (discoverer of penicillin) were all British. The UK remains one of the leading providers of technological innovations today, providing inventions as diverse as the World Wide Web and Viagra (created by Tim Berners-Lee and Pfizer respectively).

Other famous scientists, engineers and inventors from the UK include: John Logie Baird, William Caxton, Richard Trevithick, Robert Hooke, Humphry Davy, Robert Watson-Watt, Henry Bessemer, Frank Pantridge and others.

Religion. Main article: Religion in the United Kingdom

Although today one of the more 'secularised' states in the world^{[citation needed]}, the United Kingdom was created as a Protestant Christian country and Protestant churches remain the largest faith group in each country of the UK.

The Anglican Church of England, is the Established Church in England. The Queen is Supreme Governor of the Church of England.

The Presbyterian Church of Scotland is regarded as the national church in Scotland.

The Anglican Church in Wales was disestablished in 1920.

The Anglican Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1871.

Other religions followed in the UK include Roman Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism, and Buddhism. While 2001 census information^[6] suggests that over 75 percent of UK citizens consider themselves to belong to a religion, Gallup International reports that only 10 percent of UK citizens regularly attend religious services, compared to 15 percent of French citizens and 57 percent of American citizens. A 2004 YouGov poll found that 44 percent of UK citizens believe in God, while 35 percent do not.^[7] The disparity between the census data and the YouGov data has been put down to a phenomenon described as "cultural Christianity", whereby many who do not believe in God still identify with the religion they were bought up as, or the religion of their parents.

Cuisine. Main article: British cuisine

Sunday roast consisting of roast beef, roast potatoes, vegetables and Yorkshire pudding

Fish and chips, a popular take-away food of the United Kingdom.

British cuisine is the specific set of cooking traditions and practices associated with the United Kingdom. Historically, British cuisine means "unfussy dishes made with quality local ingredients, matched with simple sauces to accentuate flavour, rather than disguise it."^[8] However, British cuisine has absorbed the cultural influence of those that settled in Britain, producing hybrid dishes, such as the Anglo-Indian Chicken tikka masala, hailed as "Britain's true national dish".^[9]^[10]

Vilified as "unimaginative and heavy", British cuisine has traditionally been limited in its international recognition to the full breakfast and the Christmas dinner.^[11] However, Celtic agriculture and animal breeding produced a wide variety of foodstuffs for indigenous Celts and Britons. Anglo-Saxon England developed meat and savoury herb stewing techniques before the practice became common in Europe. The Norman conquest introduced exotic spices into Great Britain in the Middle Ages.^[11] The British Empire facilitated a knowledge of India's elaborate food tradition of "strong, penetrating spices and herbs".^[11] Food rationing policies, put in place by the British government during wartime periods of the 20th century,^[12] are said to have been the stimulus for British cuisine's poor international reputation.^[11]

British dishes include fish and chips, the Sunday roast, and bangers and mash. British cuisine has several national and regional varieties, including English, Scottish and Welsh cuisine, which each have developed their own regional or local dishes, many of which are geographically indicated foods such as Cheshire cheese, the Yorkshire pudding, Arbroath Smokie and Welsh rarebit.

Education. Main article: Education in the United Kingdom

Each country of the United Kingdom has a separate education system, with power over education matters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland being devolved. Education matters for England are dealt with by the UK government since there is no devolved administration for England.

England

Eton College

Main article: Education in England

Most schools came under state control in the Victorian era, a formal state school system was instituted after the Second World War. Initially schools were separated into infant schools (normally up to age 4 or 5), primary schools and secondary schools (split into more academic grammar schools and more vocational secondary modern schools). Under the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s most secondary modern and grammar schools were combined to become comprehensive schools. England has many prominent private schools, often founded hundreds of years ago, which are known as public schools or independent schools. Eton, Harrow and Rugby are three of the better known. Most primary and secondary schools in both the private and state sectors have compulsory school uniforms. Allowances are almost invariably made, however, to accommodate religious dress including the Islamic hijab and Sikh bangle (kara).

Although the Minister of Education is responsible to Parliament for education, the day to day administration and funding of state schools is the responsibility of Local Education Authorities.

England's universities include the so-called Oxbridge universities of (Oxford University and Cambridge University) which are amongst the world's oldest universities and are generally ranked top of all British universities. Some institutions are world-renowned in specialised and often narrow areas of study, such as Imperial College London (science and engineering) and London School of Economics (economics and social sciences). Academic degrees are usually split into classes: first class (I), upper second class (II:1), lower second class (II:2) and third (III), and unclassified (below third class).

Northern Ireland. Main article: Education in Northern Ireland

The Northern Ireland Assembly is responsible for education in Northern Ireland though responsibility at a local level is administered by 5 Education and Library Boards covering different geographical areas.

Scotland. Main article: Education in Scotland

Scotland has a long history of universal provision of public education, and the Scottish education system is distinctly different from other parts of the United Kingdom. Traditionally, the Scottish system has emphasised breadth across a range of subjects compared to the English, Welsh and Northern Irish system has emphasised greater depth of education over a smaller range of subjects at secondary school level.

The majority of schools are non-denominational, but by legislation separate Roman Catholic schools, with an element of control by the Roman Catholic Church, are provided by the state system.

Qualifications at the secondary school and post-secondary (further education) level are provided by the Scottish Qualifications Authority and delivered through various schools, colleges and other centres. Political responsibility for education at all levels is vested in the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Executive Education and Enterprise, Transport & Lifelong Learning Departments

State schools are owned and operated by the local authorities which act as Education Authorities, and the compulsory phase is divided into primary school and secondary school (often called High school). Schools are supported in delivering the National Guidelines and National Priorities by Learning and Teaching Scotland.

Scottish universities generally have courses a year longer than their counterparts elsewhere in the UK, though it is often possible for students to take a more advanced specialised exams and join the courses at the second year. One unique aspect is that the ancient universities of Scotland issue a Master of Arts as the first degree in humanities.

Wales. Main article: Education in Wales

The National Assembly for Wales has responsibility for education in Wales. A significant number of students in Wales are educated either wholly or largely through the medium of Welsh and lessons in the language are compulsory for all until the age of 16. There are plans to increase the provision of Welsh Medium schools as part of the policy of having a fully bi-lingual Wales.

2009.08.23.
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Morris Dancing

Culture of the United Kingdom. 500+ links

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