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

[Lionsandtigersandbears7]

Inspired by another thread ,it got me thinking I don't really have a strong sense of my identity being British..
I'm born in UK ,but moved around a lot ,so don't have an area I feel is home either ,or a strong sense of being British.
There's Christian festivals.christmas and Easter ..is that classed as our culture ?or is that religion?..I suppose there were mods and rockers and teddy boys ,that would of given people a sense of identity..then skinheads and skar ..moving in to music , different types like rock and indie gives people an identity...I missed all that though..
On postcards you get beaches and the seaside towns .. Blackpool was part of my childhood holidays,does that make up part of my identity then ?..
What makes me British other than just being born here ..I feel like culture and identity has passed me by .
I get what it would mean to be Scottish or Irish..I can see an identity with that ..but all I can think of for British is morris dancing.

A few more :
Agatha Christie
Stiff upper lip (to some extent at least)
Fair play
Tea
Love of animals especially dogs

Pubs and rain.

Walking through the rain in vibrant green fields to get to the pub while complaining about the rain, but you're not allowed to acknowledge that without the rain nothing would be the deep green it is. But we all know.

And the humour. Boaty mcboatface is one of my personal favourites. It's funny, subversive and mocks ourselves.

On days when all this happens I feel truly British and I love it.

I lived in Paris for a few years and fainted once at the top of an escalator at the metro station. People literally stepped over me tutting and complaining! It was awful and humiliating. I actually found it a really stressful place to live because of the constant rudeness. Not all France like this of course. But Paris is exhausting! And I'm bilingual with dual French nationality so I do blend in there quite well. I think generally tourists are treated better than the average "person on the street".

That's one thing I do find generally true in the UK, that politeness to strangers is still a thing.

Very few things are 'exclusively' the preserve of one country.

However, thanking the driver on exiting a bus is a very British 'thing'. I know foreign residents who have remarked upon it in an admiring way, as a small act of kindness they thought very 'British'. They also said you'd be considered daft if you did such a thing in their home country, and the driver would be at a loss for how to respond.

I agree that capital cities are often very different in character from the rest of the country. London is not England, and certainly not Britain! Some people love that metropolitan buzz and the high-density people…but I don’t. Give me a nice cathedral city or market town!

Boaty McBoat Face was outstanding;

Government; we've got a fancy new ship and we going to have s special poll fur the public to choose a name.

The People: Boatyard McBoat Face

Government: Now, you've all been very silly and we clearly can't trust you to do this sensibly.

Pulling over to let a tractor and a load of cars past. Getting repetitive strain injury from lifting your finger or hand to say "You are welcome " to every driver that comes through and says thank you.

Danny Boyles London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony did a good job of summing it up for me. You can still find it online.

Another British trait.... complaining how rubbish the UK is. 😉

It does happen in the UK too, sadly. Sorry that happened to you. I would have helped you

Yes, and they shouldn’t be allowed to succeed in making people who want to feel British feel that they can’t be British.

I love both - I love variety and Britain has that in spades! I love the variation of accents, food, architecture and landscape as you move around our fairly small land mass, it’s truly amazing.

Oh the accents - yes, that's another interesting facet of the British Isles.

When I was at university I had to learn to transcribe speech using the phonetic alphabet and you had to be very accurate regarding specific accents. I became really good (sorry for stealth boast...) at pinning down English accents - eg I can tell a South Yorkshire from a North Yorkshire, and there are at least 3 different Lancs accents, I can tell Black Country from Brum and Staffordshire etc etc, North Wales from South Wales. (OK, enough of the boasting now). I am fascinated by accents and this is a really rich heritage, often telling us a lot about the history of particular areas.

I'm not so good at Scottish and Irish accents, but I think I can recognise Dublin from other Irish Republic ones, and of course the Northern Irish one. And I can tell Glasgow from Edinburgh!

I apologise for this catalogue of bragging, but you just reminded me of this and it's been a great pleasure since my uni days to try to pinpoint where an accent originates. I assume other nationalities have regional accents, but I guess they're hard for non-native speakers to discern.

Or like me have bought on vinted that doesn't fit but dont have the time or organisational skills to relist!

The appropriate message in Bristol is ‘Cheers Drive’ and everybody says it. Bristolians’ standard greeting is ‘orright?’ and it is perfectly acceptable to address people you don’t know from a bar of soap as ‘my love’, ‘my lover’ or ‘my babber ’. Don’t know if those things are English or British or purely Bristolian.

Because I have not lived in my home town since I was 18 and nI have lived all around the world and settled in an area of the UK with a distinctly different accent to my birth town, my accent is a bit of a mess and it's funny when people try to guess where I'm from. I ham up my accent when I go home - they get a bit defensive if you sound like you have tried to "improve yourself". Of course a lifetime of repeating myself when people don't understand me has led me to pronounce certain words in a mor neutral accent - but in my head they sound weird when I say them. Dh who sounds more on the RP side of things tries to replicate the old sayings (I love the old sayings too) from my birth town, it just doesn't work in RP - but it's funny.
And talking about the old sayings - my kids started a secret list of all the things I "come out with" that they are not familiar with - they find these old sayings very funny, I love the list (but it took them a while to reveal it!)

I’m so aware of the wit of the Brits. The fact that we joke about everything, is the most lovable quality. A sardonic line, here , there, and everywhere, coupled with British lovely manners and readiness to say ‘ sorry!’ , makes every occasion easier and more pleasant. I feel at home in the culture of humour and warmth, it’s British through and through. All that, plus tea and biscuits. Doesn't get any better!

Ironically I think the opposite is true. I think Reform are succeeding because so many British feel they can’t be British any more.

We are made to flagellate ourselves constantly about our imperial heritage, our cultural Christianity, our failure to the Windrush generation, wanting sovereignty away from an EU megastate, our scepticism of misogynist cultures, our Island mentality in wanting controlled immigration etc etc.

Oh, yes! All the attempted guilt tripping is driving the flag flying. It’s funny isn’t it, the whole baggage dump on the Brits has really boomeranged back at them, as Brits double down on being proud to be British.
only the kids who the most vulnerable to influence have suffered from the anti Brit attacks. I do feel sorry for them, it’s incredibly unfair to demand guilt from kids that are just starting their lives, really. Very manipulative.. or as they say nowadays.. a toxic narrative!

@Screamingabdabz yet there’s none of that on this thread. I think the “we can’t be British” sentiment is largely confected by the press, and most Brits are quietly content with our traditions and landscape. British culture has never been definitive or exclusive. Waves and waves of migration haven’t eradicated British culture, only added to its rich tapestry and linguistic diversity.
If people want to come and homogenise us into one thing, we instinctively react, but if they come with new words and a different way to make meat and bread delicious we welcome them. That is why Britain is indomitable.
Not because we protect an imagined bucolic past, but because we assimilate all types of people into the Borg of Britishness and bring that into the future.

I largely agree, but having worked in education all my life, I’ve often been dismayed at the scorn and disparagement of indigenous culture in many contexts. Lots of anecdotes, but I won’t bore pps here!

It tended to be from not-very-bright people who had misinterpreted the multicultural movement and equated anything traditional or British (dirty words to these daft specimens ) as being racist and Little Englander.

Just one…I remember a teacher, when it was suggested we base a teaching unit on traditional tales, frowning earnestly and saying “Hmmm…what does traditional mean? Are these stories going to be racist?” She said she hated the word ‘traditional’. Dearie me!

We’re not made to do any of that stuff. None of it prevents people being “British” in any way. You feel like it’s constant because you listen to the likes of Reform / Farage / Tice et al who push it in order to create division in our society and enable their Oligarch turbo capitalism to exploit us even more.

Do you mean England?

Yes, I can place someone quite accurately if they live within a about a 50 mile radius of me. The accents are all slightly different. We've all grown up with slightly different slang words and errors of speech too.

I used to work with a Yorkshire girl who hated children ‘ skriking’. I loved this word which I’d never heard before. It turns out to derive from Old Norse, brought over by the Vikings, who were very big in Yorkshire! There are so many interesting local words, sayings and pronunciations which tell us about the history of the British Isles.

I use skriking as often as possible!

and there are at least 3 different Lancs accents,

3 is probably way underestimating the number! Going the 8 miles from Bolton to Salford there are 2 different accents for a start and it's a big county. That was in the days before all the Greater Manchester nonsense, for me Bolton never left Lancashire! I remember asking why my relatives in Salford talked funny when I was about 8.