Are the British “cultured”?

[Astronutty]

A (Swedish) friend recently made an observation to me that she found the British to be very cultured. This surprised me so I asked her what she meant. Her point that with the wide access to libraries, book stores, BBC radio, museums and so on, she found the UK to be more cultured compared to her native Sweden. She’d studied at UK University and found most undergraduates were engaged in politics and the world around them.

I’d always thought of France as a more cultural place and didn’t think UK stood out in that regard.

Would you consider the UK a cultured country?

Depends which circles you move I , sone people are and sone aren't. On the whole the infrastructure we have does have a good cultural scene built into most cities

Some people are. But it's very obvious that many Brits are far from cultured!

It’s part of our culture 😁

But the OP’s friend clearly meant ‘high culture’ from what she referenced, not Crufts, pantomime, football, tv quizzes, or queueing on the Mall to wave little flags for the Coronation.

That is the case for 99.9% of people in all the countries in the world. Many are seriously not cultured, and a high percentage are totally illiterate.

On balance the U.K. has a huge reservoir of culture at every level running through the entire nation. Global perspective is required to see the bigger picture culturally.

Agreed.

It depends where you are. Not for nothing is "intellectual" considered an insult here.

But yes, England is a highly literate culture with lots of publishing, plays, novels, poetry, journalism, and emphasis on the written word. That's still true and it is appreciably greater than elsewhere.

Here we go again a Brit bashing thread!
It depends on the person…..individual people are not a reflection of a whole nation. Is it really a difficult concept to grasp?

Is there a more literary (not literate) nation in the world than the UK? Maybe Ireland or France, but I suspect the UK is pre-eminent.

Her sample was rather skewed if she was judging upon the basis of fellow university students. Of course they are not all cultured. however, we have a huge (almost inexhaustible) amount of cultural capital at our disposal, especially down South and there is a sizable minority who fully and thoroughly enjoy having access to it. If you only ever travel by cab from theatre to gallery to museum and between fine restaurants (as I see many wealthy retired folk doing), you can create a little culture bubble all of your own. That bubble will burst fairly abruptly if the cab breaks down though!

Quite a lot of people on this thread are conflating cultured and culture.
I find that in the UK it's very much a class thing whether someone enjoys and participates in cultural pursuits.

as the OP I don’t see it that way. After some consideration, I found myself agreeing with my friend. That we do have a lot of culture (although we’re not homogenous) but we take it for granted

Not just ‘take it for granted’. A fair proportion of the population seem to be completely unaware of about 85% of what’s available here.

But certainly ‘Does Britain create and maintain a huge amount of cultural product, ostensibly available to everyone?’ is a different question to whether we are, as a national community, cultured!

Iceland.

I think she was being sarcastic!