Cultural life

England’s contribution to both British and world culture is too vast for anything but a

cursory survey here. Historically, England was a very homogeneous country and

developed coherent traditions, but, especially as the British Empire expanded and the

country absorbed peoples from throughout the globe, English culture has been accented

with diverse contributions from Afro-Caribbeans, Asians, Muslims, and other immigrant

groups. Other parts of the United Kingdom have experienced the same social and cultural

diversification, with the result that England is not always distinguishable

from Wales and Scotland or even Northern Ireland. The former insularity of English life

has been replaced by a cosmopolitan familiarity with all things exotic: fish and chips have

given way to Indian, Chinese, and Italian cuisine, guitar-based rock blends with South

Asian rap and Afro-Caribbean salsa, and the English language itself abounds in neologisms

drawn from nearly every one of the world’s tongues.

Even as England has become ever more diverse culturally, it continues to exert a strong

cultural influence on the rest of the world. English music, film, and literature enjoy wide

audiences overseas, and the English language has gained ever-increasing currency as the

preferred international medium of cultural and economic exchange.

Daily life and social customs

Historically, English daily life and customs were markedly different in urban and rural

areas. Indeed, much of English literature and popular culture has explored the tension

between town and country and between farm and factory. Today, even though the English

are among the world’s most cosmopolitan and well-traveled people, ties to the rural past

remain strong. Urbanites, for example, commonly retire to villages and country cottages,

and even the smallest urban dwelling is likely to have a garden.

Object 1
Another divide, though one that is fast disappearing, is the rigid class system that long

made it difficult for nonaristocratic individuals to rise to positions of prominence in

commerce, government, and education. Significant changes have accompanied the decline

of the class system, which also had reinforced distinctions between town and country and

between the less affluent north of England and the country’s wealthy south. For example,

whereas in decades past English radio was renowned for its “proper” language, the

country’s airwaves now carry accents from every corner of the country and its former

empire, and the wealthy are likely to enjoy the same elements of popular culture as the less

advantaged.

Object 2

Many holidays in England, such as Christmas, are celebrated throughout the world, though

the traditional English Christmas is less a commercial event than an opportunity for

singing and feasting. Remembrance Day (November 11) honours British soldiers who died

in World War I. Other remembrances are unique to England and are nearly inexplicable to

outsiders. For example, Guy Fawkes Night (November 5) commemorates a Roman

Catholic conspiracy to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, and Saint George’s Day

(April 23) honours England’s patron saint—though the holiday is barely celebrated at all in

England, in marked contrast to the celebrations in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland for their

respective patron saints. Indeed, the lack of official celebration for Saint

George contributes to the ambiguity of “Englishness” and whether it can now be

distinguished from “Britishness.” The monarch’s official birthday is also observed

nationally and commemorated in the summer by a military parade called Trooping the

Colour, which has been celebrated since the 18th century.

Object 3

English cuisine has traditionally been based on beef, lamb, pork, chicken, and fish, all

cooked with the minimum of embellishment and generally served with potatoes and one

other vegetable—or, in the case of fish (most commonly cod or haddock) deep-fried in

batter and served with deep-fried potato slices (chips). Fish and chips, traditionally

wrapped in old newspapers to keep warm on the journey home, has long been one of

England’s most popular carryout dishes. By convention, at least for middle-income

households, the main family meal of the week was the “Sunday joint,” when a substantial

piece of beef, lamb, or pork was roasted in the oven during the morning and served around

midday. In the 1950s and ’60s, however, these traditions started to change. Immigrants

from India and Hong Kong arrived with their own distinctive cuisine, and Indian and

Chinese restaurants became a familiar sight in every part of England. By the 1980s,

American-style fast-food restaurants dotted the landscape, and the rapid post-World War

II growth of holiday travel to Europe, particularly to France, Spain, Greece, and Italy,

exposed the English to new foods, flavours, and ingredients, many of which found their

way into a new generation of recipe books that filled the shelves of the typical English

kitchen.
The arts of England
Literature
In its literature, England arguably has attained its most influential cultural expression. For

more than a millennium, each stage in the development of the English language has

produced its masterworks.

Little is known of English literature before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, though echoes

of England’s Celtic past resound in Arthurian legend. Anglo-Saxon literature, written in

the Old English language, is remarkably diverse. Its surviving corpus includes hymns, lyric

poems such as “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer,” riddles and spells, songs, and the epic

poem Beowulf, which dates from the 9th or 10th century. Following the Norman

Conquest of 1066, French influence shaped the vocabulary as well as the literary

preoccupations of Middle English. Geoffrey Chaucer epitomized both the courtly

philosophical concerns and the earthy vernacular of this period in his Troilus and

Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales, respectively, while William Langland’s Piers

Plowman was an early expression of the religious and political dissent that would later

characterize English literature. The Elizabethan era of the late 16th century fostered the

flowering of the European Renaissance in England and the golden age of English literature.

The plays of William Shakespeare, while on their surface representing the culmination of

Elizabethan English, achieve a depth of characterization and richness of invention that

have fixed them in the dramatic repertoire of virtually every language. The publication of

the King James Version of the Bible in 1611 infused the literature of the period with both

religious imagery and a remarkably vigorous language, and it served as an important

instrument for the spread of literacy throughout England. Political and religious conflicts

of the 17th century provided a backdrop for a wealth of poetry, ranging from

the metaphysical introspections of John Donne to the visionary epics of John Milton, in

addition to the prose allegory Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan.

William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare, detail of an oil painting attributed to John Taylor, c. 1610. The portrait is called the “Chandos Shakespeare”
because it once belonged to the duke of Chandos.

Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London (http://www.npg.org.uk)

The dichotomy of Classicism and Romanticism as well as of reason and imagination came

to dominate the 18th century, with the Neoclassical satire and criticism of Alexander

Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson on the one hand and the somewhat

later Romantic self-expression of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, and John Keats on the other. Also during this period, the novel emerged as a

form capable of bringing everyday life into the province of literature, as can be seen in the

work of Jane Austen. At roughly this point, the distinctive regions of England began to

exert a powerful influence on many writers—such as the Lake District on Wordsworth,

the Yorkshire moors on the Brontë sisters (Anne, Charlotte, and Emily), Dorset on Thomas

Hardy, the Midlands coalfields on D.H. Lawrence, and London on Charles Dickens. In the

mid to late 19th century, English literature increasingly addressed social concerns, yielding

the utopian writings of William Morris and Samuel Butler, the psychological analysis

of George Eliot, the realistic novels of Elizabeth Gaskell, and the nationalistic stories and

fables of Rudyard Kipling. Many writers also found a new audience in children, giving rise

to work such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and generating later

classics such as Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Beatrix Potter’s Peter

Rabbit stories, A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and even, it can

be argued, the late 20th-century work of J.K. Rowling.

Object 4

William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth, engraving, 1833.
Photos.com/Getty Images Plus
Dickens, Charles
Charles Dickens.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

English literature in the 20th century was remade by native writers such as Virginia Woolf.

It also absorbed and transmuted alien elements, taking into the mainstream of its tradition

poets as Irish as William Butler Yeats, as Welsh as Dylan Thomas, or as securely in the

classic line as the American expatriates T.S. Eliot and Henry James. Popular novelists such

as Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Dick Francis, and John Le Carré fed the English love for

mysteries and police procedurals, while poets W.H. Auden, Ted Hughes, and Philip

Larkin brought a new approach to questions of personal relationships, and

novelists Anthony Burgess, Graham Greene, and Kingsley Amis dealt

with moral ambiguities and modern dilemmas. Many others, including Iris

Murdoch and Martin Amis, worked in a well-established comic or satiric vein. Immigration

continued to diversify England’s literary landscape, producing writers such as V.S.

Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Kazuo Ishiguro. (For further discussion, see English

literature.)
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf, photograph by Gisèle Freund, 1939.

Gisèle Freund

Architecture of England
English architecture has varied significantly by location, according to readily available

building materials. The typical Cotswold village, for example, consists of structures of the

local silvery limestone with slate roofs. A honey-coloured stone was much used in Oxford,

and a rusty ironstone is typical in northern Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire, along the

line of an ironstone belt. Half-timber framing and thatch roofing are characteristic of the

river valleys, and excellent clay provides the warm red brick of southern England. The ease

with which cheap but nonnative materials can now be transported is to be blamed for

many jarring intrusions into the harmonious towns and villages originally built mainly of

local materials.
Stylistically, English architecture has been much influenced from abroad, but foreign styles

take on an English aspect. The Gothic architecture of France was transformed into a

characteristically English style by the delicate use of stone to provide a framework for walls

that were almost all glass, culminating in triumphs of the Perpendicular style, such as

King’s College Chapel at Cambridge. The European Renaissance influenced the buildings

of Christopher Wren, yet his many London churches seem essentially English; though

Wren’s work was derided as old-fashioned when he was alive, the buildings are now

considered among England’s greatest architectural accomplishments. Similarly, the

magnificent country houses of the 18th century are not mere importations of a foreign

fashion but fit their landscape; and many such landscapes were designed by the great

English garden and park designers William Kent, Lancelot (“Capability”) Brown,

and Humphry Repton. This type of collaboration can be seen in the later work of Edwin

Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll.

London: St. Paul's Cathedral

St. Paul's Cathedral, London; designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)

London: St. Paul's Cathedral
West facade of St. Paul's Cathedral, London.

© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)

London: St. Paul's Cathedral
Western view from the Golden Gallery of St. Paul's Cathedral, London.

© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)

Many urban slums and industrial structures have been earmarked for demolition, but

much contemporary building that is adequate for habitation or work is drearily uninspired.

Still, England continues to produce high-calibre internationally known architects such

as James Stirling and Norman Foster. The reconstruction of the World War II-damaged

city areas provided opportunities for notable new architecture, and some original design

and construction was undertaken; examples include the Barbican scheme in a large

bombed area in London, north of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the Royal National Theatre on

the south bank of the Thames. Among London’s more notable modern buildings are the

headquarters for Lloyd’s in the City and the controversial Millennium Dome at Greenwich,

which at its completion in 1999 was the largest enclosed space in the world. Outside
London, notable projects include the Coventry precinct and cathedral by Sir Basil Spence,

the Roman Catholic cathedral in Liverpool, designed by Sir Frederick Gibberd, and a batch

of new universities founded during the 1960s, such as those

near Brighton, Canterbury, Colchester, Norwich, and York.

Object 5

Increasingly, however, architects have sought to modernize or imitate old structures,

rather than design completely new ones. Thus the building that housed the Covent

Garden flower market has become one of London’s most visited arcades, containing shops,

restaurants, and informal entertainment; a power station on the south bank of the Thames

has been converted into Tate Modern, the world’s largest modern art gallery; and

Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre has been rebuilt of materials like those of the original and to

the specifications of the original design. London’s riverside, like that of many other cities,

has been transformed by the conversion of old buildings, especially warehouses, into

modern homes and apartments.

Object 6
Globe Theatre
Nighttime view of the reconstructed Globe Theatre (completed in 1997) from across the River Thames, London.

© microimages/Fotolia
Tate Modern
Tate Modern, Bankside, London.

© Alex Yeung/Fotolia
Immigration, too, has changed the architectural look of England, especially with the many

new non-Christian houses of worship that have been built. Hundreds of Hindu temples

and Muslim mosques have been established throughout the country since World War II,

and some of them, such as the Hindu temple constructed in the 1990s north of London in

Neasden, have generated much commentary—both praise and criticism for their sheer size

and ornateness.
Neasden: Shri Swaminarayan Temple
Shri Swaminarayan Temple, Neasden, Brent, London.

Colin Gregory Palmer

Visual arts
Sculpture
Apart from traces of decoration on standing stones and the “transplanted” art of Roman

occupation, the history of sculpture in England is rooted in the Christian church.

Monumental crosses of carved stone, similar to the Celtic crosses of Ireland, represent the

earliest sculpture of Anglo-Saxon Christians. The tradition of relief carving attained its

highest expression in the stonework of the Gothic cathedrals, such as that at Wells (c.

1225–40).

The influences of Renaissance and Baroque sculpture on the Continent were slow to reach

England. What borrowings there were prior to the 18th century remained ill-conceived and

crudely executed. From the 1730s, however, the presence of first-rate foreign artists,

together with the flowering of archaeology and the resulting accessibility of antique art,

brought a new refinement to English sculpture. The Roman influence that

precipitated Neoclassicism gave way in England to the Greek with the arrival of

the Parthenon sculptures, known as the Elgin Marbles, which were taken from the temple
and sold to the British Museum in the early 1800s. While the Romantic movement of the

19th century, which assailed the academic restraint of Neoclassicism in all the arts,

invested continental sculpture with an increasing subjectivity, as well as a broader range of

subject matter, the sculptors of England pursued a more conservative path. Many free-

standing public monuments—the descendants of sepulchral effigies—date from this period.

Not until the 20th century did English sculptors break free of traditional bounds and attain

a deeply personal mode of expression. The sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara

Hepworth both came from Yorkshire, and something of the quality of moorland stone can

be seen in their work. In 1998 the largest sculpture ever executed in Britain was unveiled—

Angel of the North, created by Antony Gormley. Made of steel, 65 feet (20 metres) high,

and with a 169-foot (52-metre) span, it dominates the skyline near Gateshead, south of

the River Tyne.
Antony Gormley: Angel of the North
Angel of the North, steel sculpture by Antony Gormley, 1998; near Gateshead, England.

© Gordon Ball LRPS/Shutterstock.com

Painting
Painting in England emerged under the auspices of the church. From the 8th to the 14th

century the illumination of Gospel manuscripts developed from essentially abstract

decoration derived from Celtic motifs to self-contained pictorial illustration more in

keeping with the style of the European continent. In the 15th century,

Italian innovations in perspective and composition began to appear in English work. The

advent of printing during this period, however, rendered the labour-intensive illumination

increasingly rare. English painting remained largely unaffected by the concerns of the

Renaissance, and it was not until the 1630s, when Charles I employed the Flemish Baroque

painters Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck in his court, that a broader artistic

current reached England’s shores. Even so, provincial themes and the genres of portrait

and landscape continued to preoccupy English painters for the next 150 years.
 Object 7

The foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768 provided a focal point for the

currents of Neoclassicism in English architecture, sculpture, and painting. Under the aegis

of the academy, painters rendered historical and mythological subjects with a bold linear

clarity. Just as the strictures of Neoclassicism developed partly in reaction to the excesses

of the Baroque and Rococo, Romanticism emerged partly in defiance of academic

formality. Classical antiquity, however, particularly in its ruined state, continued to

provide themes and imagery. The works of the poet and painter William Blake epitomize

the spiritual preoccupations of the period. Advances in science inspired a renewed artistic

interest in the natural world. John Constable and J.M.W. Turner anticipated the French

Impressionist movement by more than half a century in their landscape paintings charged

with light and atmosphere. The early Romantic fascination with biblical

and medieval themes resurged in the mid 19th century among the so-called Pre-

Raphaelite painters, who combined technical precision with explicit moral content.

Object 8

William Blake: Pity
Pity, colour print finished in pen and watercolour by William Blake, 1795; in the Tate Collection, London.

Courtesy of the trustees of the Tate, London; photographs, G. Robertson, A.C. Cooper Ltd.
J.M.W. Turner: Rain, Steam, and Speed—the Great Western Railway
Rain, Steam, and Speed—the Great Western Railway, oil on canvas by J.M.W. Turner, 1844; in the National Gallery, London.

Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York

The emergence of the artist-craftsman, as exemplified by the Pre-Raphaelite Edward

Burne-Jones and the designer and social theorist William Morris, brought new vigour to

the decorative arts in England. Their successors exhibited a strong affinity for the

Continental Art Nouveau movement. Notable 20th-century English painters included R.B.

Kitaj (born in the United States), Bridget Riley, David Hockney, Peter Blake, Francis

Bacon (born in Dublin of English parents), and Gilbert and George.

Bacon, Francis: Three Studies of Lucian Freud
Three Studies of Lucian Freud, triptych by Francis Bacon, 1969.

Press Association/AP Images

Performing arts
Theatre
Theatre is probably the performing art for which England is best known. Theatrical

performance as such emerged during the Middle Ages in the form of mumming plays,

which borrowed elements from wandering entertainers, traditional and ancient folk

agricultural rituals, and dances such as the Morris dance (with its set character parts).

Under the influence of Christianity, mumming plays gradually were absorbed by mystery

plays (centred on the Passion of Christ).

In the 16th century, when England’s King Henry VIII rejected Rome and formed a national

church, Latin theatrical traditions also were rejected; consequently, the Elizabethan and

Jacobean ages forged a distinctive tradition and produced some extraordinary and highly

influential playwrights, particularly Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. A

later influence on theatre in England was the rise in the 19th century of the actor-manager,

the greatest being Henry Irving.

That England remains one of the foremost contributors to world theatre can be seen in its

lively theatrical institutions, such as the Royal Shakespeare Company (1864; reorganized

in 1961 by Peter Hall), the Royal National Theatre (1962), regional theatres such as the

Bristol Old Vic, and the great number of theatres that flourish in London’s celebrated West

End district. Moreover, throughout the 20th century the works of English playwrights were

much acclaimed: from Noël Coward’s bittersweet plays of the 1930s to the “kitchen sink”

dramas of the 1950s by the Angry Young Men, such as John Osborne, to the more recent

contributions of Harold Pinter, Edward Bond, David Hare, Howard Brenton, Alan

Ayckbourn, Tom Stoppard, and Caryl Churchill and the musical extravaganzas of Andrew

Lloyd Webber. Similarly, English actors, many of them trained at the Royal Academy of

Dramatic Art, continue to be among the world’s best-known. Many are skilled dramatic

actors, but just as many are comic. Honed on the stages in the music-hall tradition, English

comedy—from the lowbrow humour of Benny Hill to the more cerebral work of Rowan

Atkinson, Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and the Monty Python group—has been one of the

country’s most successful cultural exports. (See also theatre, history of.)

David Hare
David Hare.

© Featureflash/Shutterstock.com
Monty Python's Flying Circus
(From left to right) John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, and Terry Jones in a sketch for Monty Python's
Flying Circus, 1971.

Alan Howard—Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Film
England’s contributions to motion pictures date from the experiments with

cinematography by William Friese-Greene in the late 19th century, but,

because Britain presented a natural market for American English-language films, the

British film industry was slow in developing. The Cinematograph Film Act of 1927 required

that an escalating percentage of films shown in Britain be made domestically; as a result,

during the 1930s there was a dramatic increase in British productions and the emergence

of “quota quickies,” films made in England with Hollywood control and financing. During

this period Alfred Hitchcock emerged as England’s first great film director with early

classics such as The Thirty-nine Steps (1935) and Sabotage (1936).

 Object 9

Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock.

The Bettmann Archive

In the 1940s and early ’50s a series of social comedies made by Ealing Studios, including

films such as Kind Hearts and Coronets and Passport to Pimlico, brought further

international acclaim to the British film industry. The Pinewood and Elstree movie studios

also produced dozens of films, from low-budget horror films to the avant-garde work

of Richard Lester. In contrast to the lavish films of David Lean and Michael Powell from

this period, a movement of social-realist films emerged in the 1960s; rooted in the Free

Cinema documentary movement and borrowing from the Angry Young Men school of

British literature and drama, films by directors such as Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz,

and Tony Richardson kept alive a British film industry that was increasingly becoming a

satellite of the United States, which provided much of the funding for “English” films such

as the James Bond series.

Object 10

In the 1980s the productions of David Puttnam and the collaborations of Ismail Merchant

and James Ivory led a resurgence of British moviemaking, which continued into the 21st

century with the quintessentially English films of Hugh Hudson, Kenneth Branagh, Mike

Leigh, and Ken Loach. In addition, Nick Park’s pioneering animated shorts and feature

films, such as the Wallace and Gromit series and Chicken Run (2000), garnered

international renown. The nearness of film studios to the London stage allows directors

and actors to pursue careers in both mediums to an extent unknown in the United States.
Their work is also supported by the highly active Film Council, a government board that

works with the public and private sectors to ensure the viability of the English film

industry. (For further discussion, see motion picture.)

Music of England
The beginnings of art music in England can be traced to plainsong (plainchant). With the

aid of monks and troubadours traveling throughout Europe, musical forms of many

regions were freely intermingled and spread quickly. In the 16th and 17th centuries,

England produced many notable composers, among them John Dowland, Thomas

Morley, Thomas Tallis, and, perhaps greatest of all, William Byrd. The musical stature of

the Baroque composers Henry Purcell and George Frideric Handel remains unquestioned.

Music in England reached another peak in the late 19th century, when comic

opera attained near perfection in the work of William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Later

significant composers include Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, William Walton, and Benjamin

Britten.

Opera is regularly performed by the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, London, by the

English National Opera, and by other companies. A world-renowned opera festival is held

annually at Glyndebourne, and music festivals of many other types thrive. England also

has a number of orchestras, chamber groups, choruses, and cathedral choirs. The Sir

Henry Wood Promenade Concerts, popularly known as the “Proms” and sponsored by

the British Broadcasting Corporation, play nightly from July to September at

London’s Royal Albert Hall, forming the largest regular classical music festival in the

world.

English folk music—exemplified by ballads, sea chanteys, children’s game songs, carols,

and street cries—has had a tremendous influence on the folk music, and even the

hymnody, of the United States, Canada, and other former colonies; periodic revivals,

especially in the late 1960s and mid-1990s, helped to keep English folk music before a

broad public. Drawing on the folk and classical traditions alike, anthems such as “God Save

the Queen”, “Jerusalem,” and “Land of Hope and Glory” are held in great affection.
However, 20th-century British popular music, especially rock music, had even more visible

impact on world culture. Beginning in the 1950s with skiffle groups, young Britons began

borrowing from American blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll to create their own

version of each. By the mid-1960s, English “beat” groups such as the Beatles, the Rolling

Stones, the Kinks, and the Who had burst onto the world stage; in the United States their

sensational popularity was labeled the British Invasion. Thereafter, rock and pop music

remained among Britain’s main cultural exports, marked by the international popularity

of Led Zeppelin, Elton John, and Pink Floyd in the 1970s and punk groups such as the Sex

Pistols and the Clash later in the decade; performers as various as the Police, the Smiths,

Boy George, the Spice Girls, Oasis, Blur, and Radiohead in the 1980s and ’90s; and

the techno music of the turn of the century.

the Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones in the mid-1960s.

© David Redfern/Retna

Dance
Closely associated with song in folk tradition, folk dances have their origins in many of the

same sources—mummers’ dances, masques, and assorted ancient rituals of birth,

courtship, war, death, and rebirth. In England remnants of early forms of sword

dances, Morris dances, and country dances remain popular participatory entertainment.

From the 14th to the 17th century, performance-oriented dances, including court dances

and dances developed for the stage, were much in evidence in more sophisticated circles of

society. Although dancing masters and ballet as such were in existence from the 18th

century, a native impulse toward the ballet really began to take hold in England only in the

early 20th century, when Irish-born Ninette de Valois and Lilian Baylis established

the Vic-Wells Ballet (now the Royal Ballet) and Marie Rambert formed the Ballet Club

(now Dance Rambert). These highly talented women fostered ballet and its

offshoot, modern dance. With their leadership, England advanced to the forefront of dance

in the 20th century, producing internationally known artists such as Frederick

Ashton, Anton Dolin, Margot Fonteyn, Kenneth MacMillan, Alicia Markova, Bronisława

Nijinska, and Antony Tudor.

Cultural institutions
All manner of general and esoteric societies, institutions, museums, and foundations can

be found in England. One of its more prestigious learned societies is the Royal

Society (1660), which awards fellowships, medals, and endowed lectureships based on

scientific and technological achievements. The British Museum contains a wealth of

archaeological and ethnographic specimens; its extensive library—containing ancient

and medieval manuscripts and papyruses—was merged in 1973 with several other holdings

to form the British Library, which was in turn relocated to a new structure near St. Pancras

Station, in London, in the late 1990s. The Zoological Society of London maintains

the London Zoo and also conducts research, publishes journals, and supports a large

zoological library. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, are significant both as a research

institute and as one of England’s many places of great natural beauty. There are also

notable libraries at the University of Cambridge and at the University of

Oxford (the Bodleian Library).

Kew Gardens
Kew Gardens.

Katherine Young/Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

British Museum, London
British Museum, London, at dusk.

Dennis Marsico/Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Art galleries abound in England. The best-known are based in London and include

the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, two

Tate galleries—Tate Britain (with superb collections of John Constable and the Pre-

Raphaelites) and Tate Modern—and the Wallace Collection.

Clore Gallery
Interior of the Clore Gallery at the Tate Britain, London, by James Stirling, 1980–87.

Angelo Hornak

Sports and recreation

Although England has a lively cultural life, its characteristic pursuits are of a more popular

kind. The exploitation of leisure is increasingly the concern of commerce: foreign holiday
package tours, gambling of many kinds (from bingo to horse-race and political betting),

and the transformation of the traditional English pub by trendy interior decoration. The

English weekend is the occasion for countryside trips and for outdoor activities from

fishing to mountaineering. England gave to the world the sports of cricket, football

(soccer), and rugby football but now seldom shines at any of these in international

competitions. Among the most popular sports and recreational activities in which the

English participate are angling, basketball, snooker, and swimming. Yet the most

commonly accepted leisure activities are those connected with the home, including both

traditional and more modern, electronic distractions. Domestic comforts, epitomized in

the cozy charm of cottages and gardens and the pervasive ritual of afternoon tea, continue

to figure prominently in the character of English life. (For further discussion, including

details on sporting culture, see United Kingdom: Cultural life.)

Media and publishing

Centred in London, the broadcasting and print media in England are vast and exercise

influence not only within England and the United Kingdom but throughout the world.

Daily newspapers published in London include The Times, one of the world’s oldest

newspapers; The Sun, a tabloid that is the country’s most widely read paper, with

circulation in the millions; the The Daily Telegraph; and The Guardian (also published in

Manchester). Major regional dailies include the Manchester Evening News,

the Wolverhampton Express and Star, the Nottingham Evening Post, and the Yorkshire

Post. Periodicals, such as The Economist, also exert considerable international influence.

William Harford ThomasPeter KellnerThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica