What parts of our traditions and culture makes you feel like you belong in Britain

place marking. This is interesting

I'm British specifically English

I love how you can be in desolate countryside in one hour and a busy town in the next as our island is so small. I also love how our history is preserved and shows through from our roman roads (A5 anyone) to our tudor castles. We were invaded by so many but kept a lot of it and is still used today like the word Mercia for example.

I couldn’t actually clearly untangle my English identity from my British identity. Born and brought up in England but married a Scot and have Irish, French, and Scottish ancestry. I understand why people are irked by British/English equivalence, but English culture is inextricably linked to the rest of Britain and has extensive global influence too, so explaining English culture in isolation quickly becomes nonsensical.

Yes, you and nearly everyone else on this thread. It’s very tedious hearing British being equated with English.

Why don’t you say English, if that’s what you mean?

A lot of it is having a shared set of cultural references.

Things like the kids' TV shows you watched, the songs you dance to at weddings, the big news stories you remember breaking and what you were doing at the time, the songs you sang in school assemblies, the shops (past and present) on every high street, the brands of food you get in the supermarket and their associated adverts...

Living in a different country, it really is the small things like that which mark the difference between feeling like you come from somewhere or not. The shared references between a whole set of people. There's nothing more alienating than being at a wedding and a song comes on you've never heard of but everyone else screams in happiness and starts singing along and dancing madly, all laughing with each other. Or being at a dinner and it gets into "do you remember..." but you don't remember any of the TV shows/celebrities/adverts/shops/news events being referenced because they were specific to that country at a certain time and in their national consciousness but not yours.

A tricky one because my heritage is not English: my father was a German/Jewish refugee, my maternal grandfather a Russian refugee and my grandmother's grandfather an Irish economic refugee. We have a home on the borders of London and in Southern France.

And yet I feel innately English. In England I'd never be mistaken as anything else, in France even the French stop me for directions.

I agree with everything others have said, especially ClamChowder. What has been left out are class and inverted snobbery.

I fear for English culture at present on two fronts. We truly are at heart, as Napolean said, a nation of shopkeepers and the high street and local markets have been devastated by Amazon/internet shopping. Also the funding for the Arts and Humanities in HE risks our cultural heritage and it would be woeful if it were lost.

Food: meat and fruit pies, custards, jellies and blancmange, good meat and fresh fruit and vegetables (by virtue of our climate), steamed puddings, savoury and sweet. English food is fundamentally excellent when not swamped by beige convenience stuff. The English are lazy cooks on the whole.

There are cultural things we might actively notice and appreciate like country pubs, London buses, cricket. Then there are shared generation-specific references, e.g. to the TV programmes and adverts of previous decades.
But I think the most significant shared culture is what we take for granted and don’t notice until it’s not there. For example I occasionally see YouTube videos by Americans who’ve moved to the UK explaining how things which are perfectly normal in their culture (for example asking people about their religion as small talk!) aren’t done here and vice versa. There’s a whole raft of shared assumptions which we wouldn’t even notice.

This is like asking 'what is a woman?'

I don't know, I just am!!!

Even if I didn’t participate in any of the traditional things, or eat of the traditional food - all surface level stuff - I’d know myself to be English, and have a deep sense of connection to this land and to the history of it.

All my ancestors bones are buried in this land; my family have been in this same small part of the country for over 800 years. They’ve died in countless numbers over the centuries to defend it, to preserve it, and I’m conscious of their love for this place and the sacrifices they made to protect it as a place where their children and grandchildren could live in peace and prosperity. I remember vividly being four or five years old and seeing the beautiful autumn leaves around my ancient school building and feeling a deep sense of love and affection for this place, my home.

I don’t need to go to a bonfire night or cricket match or eat a toffee apple to know I’m completely English and have a deep, comforting sense of that identity, that long line that stretches back, that sense of belonging. It’s what I am.

Oh gosh… tricky one because I don’t feel like I necessarily recognize my country much these days. Everything feels so hateful and sad. Anyway- the things that I think of are

• Literature- Shakespeare, the brontes, the romantic poets, piers ploughman, but also Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, Carol Ann Duffy, Zadie Smith, Hilary Mantel, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan … such a rich literary tradition

• Fish and chips at the seaside. Sticks of rock and amusement arcades

• Pub culture

• Canal traditions and the liveaboard boat community

• Christmas light switch ons, complete with crap pop stars from the 80s/90s

• Curry houses

• the Archers

• Fetes and fairs - and the inevitability of the tombola and slightly eggy Victoria sponge

• The Viking Games in York each year.

• brass bands and morris dancing

• the ubiquity of trains - and train delays

• moorland walks, woodland walks, canal walks, clifftop walks- whatever the weather!

• christmas pudding. Christmas cake and cheese

• allotments

Respect for the queue, have you ever seen those english translation memes? I love those because they are utterly bang on about British politeness.

Some lovely celebratory lists here!❤️

I imagine they were a thing before the Puritans did away with them but will check this. There are still all kinds of fairs and festivals tied to particular dates in towns and villages across the country.

I am British but lived abroad until I was an adult and the things that I loved about Britain and British culture were:

The seasons
Hazelnuts, blackberries, apples
The public footpaths
Sound of wood pigeons
The type of grass we have (it looks nice, it is soft so you can sit on it and it smells great when cut)
Robins and blackbirds
Oak trees
Roses
Hawthorne
The countryside generally

Cheddar cheese
Roasts
Penny sweets and pick and mix

Books:
Agatha Christie
The dark is rising
The secret garden
Famous five
Nina Bawden
Cynthia Harnett
Jane Austin
And many, many more
Poetry

Hymns
Christmas
Churches

History - All sorts of history including castles, old houses, medieval, victorian etc.

My mum's knitting

Not much about us is exclusively English/British but there are lots of quintessential British/English experiences that don’t come together quite the same anywhere else.
Chippy chips with scraps in paper, somehow crispy and sweaty at the same time.
Going for a walk that starts in suburbia but goes straight into forest or moorland, with sunshine, drizzle, wind, and sleet in the same day. Ending up in a pub or tea room for a cuppa and a piece of improbably large cake and wondering if your red cheeks are due to sunburn or wind-chapping.
The driver nod-hand up that means thank you, and the way cars just seem to negotiate narrow roads and obstacles without much fuss on the whole (yes there are always angry drivers but most journeys just somehow work).
Being delightfully miserable as a family. Doesn’t make much sense but we kind of like having something cohesive to moan about us against the situation.
We are one of the places in the world that has amazing autumn colours.
The many and various words for bread.
The hundreds of villages and localities with slightly rude names.
The English language is built from loads of other languages so there’s huge scope for wordplay. This feeds into our humour.
Big chunky plugs that stay plugged into power sockets.
Kettles that boil fast.

Gentle weather and seasons - I live abroad now with baking summers and fierce winters.
Green, open landscape.
Sunday roasts (I am vegetarian, but still think of the roast potatoes, veg and gravy.
Bonfire Night, toffee apples.

Having lived abroad and come back it used to be our sense of humour, tolerance, ability to laugh at ourselves, the beautiful countryside.
Sadly and somewhat ironically, the so called "patriot" (read racist Reformers) are all about intolerance, and there's fuck all funny about any of them.

Every country has its own unique culture, though we are being homogenised by the Internet etc. Some of the posts above capture it really well. Try to think about what an outsider (like me) would see. Compare to other countries you've been to, what's unique to here? At root we are all human, we all do art, music, cuisine, religion, families etc. But the differences enrich us. It's good to notice them. I find uk villages very charming for example. Obviously literature. And the humour, wry, gentle, self deprecating. There's lots more too.

The confusion on this thread about what is English and what is British is probably quite telling. Even English culture is very diverse, I’m not sure that scousers for instance would think that morris dancing was a part of their culture. There are some shared references, shared history and shared behaviours which are particular to living on these isles. But people forget that culture is always evolving and always has been and isn’t a point stuck in the past.

I don't think things have to be specifically British to be part of British culture. Their existence is part of us. They can be part of other cultures too.

So e.g. I put democracy. Lots of countries have a democracy - but lots don't or it is very shaky and open to coups. But our own cluture would be weaker and different without our belief that we have free and fair elections and if we don't like the government we can vote them out in due course.

I am laughing if no one saw a queue in the UK where were they during the pandemic 😂

Sitting in the car, facing the sea, with the windscreen wipers going, eating fish and chips…because we ARE going to enjoy this day out!! 😂

I'm fond of the BBC for all it's faults. It is much admired around the world and cannot be compared to, say, American TV.

I also love a pub.

I live in London so there's lots of other things - the tube, the red double deckers, the Tower of London, the Thames, London's fabulous parks, Greenwich! - the world's clocks are set by us.

At the root of it, any culture is a series of shared experiences that can be hard to define.

Quite a few that have been cited are not specifically British.

The most traditional picture of the UK to me is the countryside pub, people drinking their pint or tea, cricket in the village and fireworks in November!