The Climate and the Regions

The British tendency to moderation perhaps reflects the cli­mate, which is exceptionally moderate: not too hot or cold, not too wet or dry. The temperature rarely goes below - 5°C or over 25°C. But the weather is often dull and damp with too little sunshine. The frequent moderate winds make it feel colder than it really is. July and August are sometimes fine, but more often mi­serable. There are no great differences of climate between the sections of the United Kingdom, except that the west has more rain than the east, and the northern mountains, particularly in Scotland, have much more rain and snow. More generally, the south­ern parts of England and Wales are a little warmer, sunnier and less misty than the rest.

Within England the eight administrative regions do not have strong cultural identities of their own. 'The styles of architec­ture do not vary, though there are parts of the south-west and north where stone houses were more common until recently than the red brick houses which predominate in most other regions. There is a clear difference between the northern way of speak­ing English and the southern way, though each has local vari­ants and each is different from what has been called ’standard English’ or ’received pronunciation’, which has no regional ba­sis and is spoken by about 3 per cent of the people, scattered around the country*

London’s dominant position has been strengthened by the needs of modern times. For 100 years the central government has extend­ed its responsibilities, partly by undertaking functions which were not performed at all before. With many local problems local representatives go to London to see central government offici­als. The main newspapers and publishers have their offices in London, so too do the advertisers and producers of television programmes. Like Prance England suffers, as compared with Ger­many, Italy and Spain, from excessive concentration of cultural life as well as business in a giant capital.

London has changed a great deal in the past fifty years, and is now perhaps more tolerant and easygoing than it used to be, with its society less consciously stratified. Par fewer people live in its central areas than fifty years ago; the old East End had 600,000 people in 1921, but has only 200,000 now. The air is now polluted more by petrol fumes than by smoke. There are no longer any of the yellow-black winter fogs that once shut out the sun.

A large proportion of the more prosperous city workers now live in distant suburbs, but there are a few rather small fashionable residential districts in the West End of London — though Mayfair, south of Oxford Street, now mostly consists of offices. Many districts, even near the centre, have a small-town life of their own, and some are dominated by people of a particular national origin — though not necessarily for more than a generation. The son of an East European Jewish immigrant of ninety years ago, leaving his comfortable suburb to visit his East End childhood home, found the old Yiddish notices gone, replaced by signs in Bengali. So much impermanence, change and movement have made the people more inno­vative, the place more lively, so full of surprises that nothing is surprising. The million or so new inhabitants from the West In­dies, Africa and Asia have contributed much to the new atmosphere. The umbrellas and bowler hats of the staid old London are rarely to be seen, and they do not own the place any more.

From one generation to the next, London and Paris seem to have changed places. There are still more French restaurants in London than English restaurants in Paris; but London is rich­er in variety because people from every corner of the world run its restaurants. Before the 1950s a Londoner could well compare the slow, smelly, dirty Paris Metro unfavourable with London*s Underground; today the comparison is the other way round.

In summer, London is now full of foreign visitors. Collecti­vely they spend as many nights there as in all the rest of Bri­tain, but those who see London as though it were the whole country are mistaken.

Outside London the southern half of England had for a long time more people than the rest of Britain. But from about 1800 the industrial revolution brought enormous development to the English north and midlands, to the Clyde estuary in Scotland and to S₀u£h Wales. These were the areas rich in the coal to po­wer the machines in the factories, and there was wool from the sheep on the nearby hills. By 1850 Manchester was a major indus­trial and commercial centre, with cotton mills mainly in the towns around it. The workers worked for long hours for little pay and lived in long rows of small red brick houses in insa­nitary conditions. The mill owners and their families prospered. Friedrich Engels was one of these, and his observation of the cruelties of this primitive stage of capitalism were reflected by his collaborator Karl Marx, then working in London in the British Museum library.

When people speak of the industrial north they think mainly of Lanchashire and Yorkshire. Between the great port of Liver­pool in the west and the smaller port of Hull in the east, the big cities of Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Bradford, along with some twenty big factory towns and many smaller ones, form a great industrial belt. Some of the buildings there are still black from smoke, some have been cleaned, and some demolished. Outside the towns the farmland is interrupted by coalmining vil­lages, some still working* But many of the mines have been clo­sed, their heaps of spoil grassed over, the winding gear still derelict or cleared away, replaced by modern factories. Further to the north-east, Newcastle upon Tyne is the centre of another industrial area (similar to Glasgow’s in Scotland), which is ba­sed on coal, iron, steel and shipbuilding. The recent decline or rationalisation of the old industries, and the growth of some new ones, have brought new social life to city waterfronts.

But more than half the northern land area is sheep country, where the bleak moors of the pennines have fine scenery and the valleys have picturesque villages. Many of the shepherds* cot­tages and village houses are now holiday and weekend homes for the people of the towns.

Not far to the south of Lanchashire, Birmingham is the centre of the West Midlands conurbation. This is as big as Manchester’s and has a vast variety of industries, particularly engineering. All through the east midlands there are other manufacturing towns, big and small, as well as coalmines.

Half of England’s people live north of a line drawn from the south edge of Birmingham to the Wash. Four-fifths of them are in big towns or their suburbs.

Apart from London, the south has fewer big towns and far few­er smokestack industries than the north. Except for quite small moorlands it has almost no hills too high for cultivation. Most of it is undulating country with hundreds of small old market towns. The scenery is green and pleasant, but not spectacular.

With its lack of heavy industry and its slightly sunnier and milder climate the south is more agreeable to some people than the north, though it has less good scenery. In the past fifty years its relative advantages have grown. Being nearer both to London and to the Continent it has had easier connections with the outside world, and nearly all today's visitors from other continents arrive at London airports. The south*s economy has adapted itself more easily than the north’s to the needs of the late twentieth century, and it is the main base of the most mo­dern industries and enterprises. More people stay at school af­ter the age of sixteen, more go to university, fewer are unem­ployed, more have middle-class jobs. More have cars, more own their own homes and more have central heating (although the weather is less cold). Health is better: fewer people die of bronchitis or of other illnesses associated with poor living conditions, pollution or bad diet. Fewer vote for the Labour Party. It is sometimes said that there are two nations, north and south, with s growing division between thé two.

The Nation’s Heritage

Much of what is most pleasing in England has been left to us by preindustrial society, or by the expenditure in the countryside of the profits made by the industry of the towns. England in particular has a very rich architectural heritage &any of the greatest of the cathedrals and other churches, built between 1100 and 1500, and in towns which have not become industrial centres and which have preserved their old character, so that the cathedrals themselves stand surrounded by expanses of grass and fine old private houses, in a setting not often equalled in continental Europe. The countryside is remarkable for the won­derful variety of shades of green in the fields and the trees — a delicacy and subtlety of colour not to be found in other pla­ces, and which reflects the lack of extremes in the climate.

The streets of old market towns and country villages are pleas­ing and harmonious, with the half-timbered houses of the six­teenth century in parts of the south and midlands, the seven­teenth-century stone of the Cotswold hills to the west of Ox­ford, and the dignified town terraces of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in many parts of the country. Some of the best examples of this period of English architecture are to be seen in bigger towns like Bristol, Bath and Brighton.

Several hundred great country houses still survive from the eighteenth century and earlier. Most of the biggest of these, with their old furniture and paintings, have become in effect museums, with their vast gardens open to the public. Some are still owned by the families who have inherited them; typically they keep a few rooms for their private use and cover the cost of maintenance with the help of the admission fees paid by thou­sands of visitors each year. Many other houses have been bought and kept alive by the National Trust, a non-state organization founded in 1895 to preserve the best of the nation's heritage. The National Trust is financed partly by entrance fees paid by visitors to its houses, partly by gifts, legacies and the sub­scriptions of its two million members. It owns and preserves not only houses and their gardens, but vast areas of moorland and mountain and 600 kilometres of coastline, all of which are open to the public. It is the biggest conservation society in the world.

Since 1945 the state has designated ten areas of wild coast or mountain as National Parks, and thirty-three smaller, less remote sections of country as Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, with severe restrictions on new quarries, industry or house building; but little of this state activity would have been successful if it had not been based on a foundation es­tablished long before.

Britain has a great length of coastline, and no place is more than three hours from the sea by car — except during week-, end traffic jams. Nineteenth-century prosperity produced, in Brighton, Bournemouth and Blackpool, three of Europe’s biggest seaside-resort towns, along with a dozen others, each now with 50,000 to over 100,000 residents, many of them retired. In sum­mer their beaches and amusements are crowded with day visitors. Some resorts were once thought to be ’fashionable’; such a notion would now seem inappropriate, even for Eastbourne or Tor­quay.

Away from the resort towns the best parts of the coast are now protected against any new building or development, and the glorious scenery of the cliffs, bays and coves of the south-west and South Wales has been made accessible by continuous public coastal footpaths. The paths are rough, and the few energetic people who walk along them can easily find solitude.

The Lake District, in the north-west, is commonly considered the most beautiful part of England. Everything is on a small scale, and the hills look higher than they really are. It seems that before the beginning of the romantic movement in the late eighteenth century people were little concerned with scenic beauty, but that period produced Wordsworth and the other Lake poets, inspired by the perfection of water, trees and heather- covered slopes.

Only fifty years ago — and for centuries before —British people were the world’s most active tourists, though not many foreigners visited Britain. Since 1970 foreign visitors have, in some years, spent as much in Britain as British people spent ab­road. Relative economic decline had not made the country miser­able for visitors. Britain has not much brilliant cooking and no Alps, and the sea is rather cold; but there are good reasons for admiring the architecture and the scenery, and for enjoying the tolerance and friendliness of the people.

AS OTHERS SEE US

We are rarely able to sее those who are very close to us as they really are because of our readiness to accept their faults and accentuate their virtues. The same is equally true when we come to look at ourselves. It is very difficult for anybody to be objective about his own character. Yet it is very good for us to try to be so from time to time. As the Scottish poet Robert Burns put it:

0 wad¹ come Pow'r the giftie² gie³ us

To see oursels⁴as others see us!

It wad frae⁵ mony⁶ a blander free us

And foolish notion.

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¹ would ²gift 3. give 4. ourselves 5. from 6. many

What Burns says about individuals is equally true of nations. Every country tends to accept its own way of life as being the normal one and to praise or criticize others аs they are simil­ar to or different from it. And unfortunately, our picture of the people and the way of life of other countries is often a dis­torted one.

Here is a great argument in favour of foreign travel and learn­ing foreign languages. It is only by travelling in, or living in a country and getting to know its inhabitants and their language, that one can find out what a country and its people are really like. And how different the knowledge one gains this way frequen­tly turns out to be from the second hand information gathered from other sources! How often we find that the foreigners whoa we thought to be such different people from ourselves are not so very different after all!

Differences between peoples do, of course, exist and, one hopes, will always continue to do so. The world will be a dull place indeed when all the different nationalities behave exactly alike, and some people might say that we are rapidly approaching this state of affairs. With almost the whole of Western Europe belonging, to the European Economic Community and the increasing standardisation that this entails, plus the much greater rapi­dity and ease of travel, there might seem some truth in this — at least as far as Europe is concerned. However this may be, at least the greater ease of travel today has revealed to more people than ever before that the Englishman or Frenchman or Ger­man is not some different kind of animal from themselves.

Yes, travel does broaden the mind. And learning the language and culture of another nation does liberalise one's outlook. It is to be hoped that more and more of the ordinary people in all countries will have the opportunity to do both things in the fu­ture. But when people travel they should be open to new experiences. Too often English people abroad create their own community keeping to English ways of life no matter where they might be.