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.

I've lived abroad for a long time but have never really identified with a British culture as such. Born and raised in Scotland and have always felt Scottish however. And fully identify with the earlier poster that mentioned that feeling of being Scottish in the Thatcher era. Much of the anti-English sentiment that I have been exposed to can probably be traced back to that time.

More generally, I have lived in a few countries and work in a highly multicultural environment with people from dozens of different countries. There are 2 things I think that are fully and intrinsically British and differentiate Brits from other nations:

• the immediate urge to put the kettle on upon returning indoors from any trip, however short
• the overriding obsession with class - and the middle class guilt, snobbery and inverse snobbery that derive from it. You don't notice how ubiquitous this class mentality is in the UK until you live in a country where class just isn't a thing. It's the one thing about the UK that I absolutely do not miss at all.

Cheer up old thing!

The pub, a full English breakfast, a nice roast dinner, a curry, prawn cocktail crisps, Swizzels Matthews sweets, Marmite.

(Can you tell I'm a very food orientated person!)

Outside of food, knowing who Mr Blobby is, Only Fools and Horses, Neighbours (Yes, I know it's Australian, but no-one watches it over there, most of its viewership was always British), BlackAdder.

Fireworks Night, Conkers, having a cider in a pub garden on a boiling hot afternoon, sticks of rock, boxing day swims, a chippie tea.

While I'm technically English, I've spent most of my life living in Wales or Scotland, so don't really identify as any of them. But all of the above make me feel very British.

Yup. I don't know about Japan, but I often read Indian news, and Modi is all over the place doing culture stuff.

What I do know a bit about is China, and culture is a massive part of the state media machine. I would say much more than in UK media.

It is used by the Party as a propaganda tool. 5000 years of history and all that. It has actually been interesting to see the way culture is promoted has changed, It's only 50 years or so since the cultural revolution, when culture was targeted for destruction, the 4 olds.

But that has been reversed , stricken from the history books, and now Chinese culture is right up there, probably in the top 3 subjects being pushed.

I'm part of the rural farming community & very proud of my English heritage & culture.

Immaculately turned out horses & livestock at our local show is probably the showcase. Tweed jackets & ties that are shared & passed down the generations of children.

My own children scrubbing up their scruffy farm ponies to compete in turn out classes that I did as a child.

Local produce show & school & church harvest festivals where families share the food they have spent all season working to produce. The whole community celebrating & thanking the people who work on the farms to feed everyone else.

One aspect of modern British (maybe English - please correct) culture I don’t like is the early commercial start to Christmas. I know European countries used to leave things until Christmas Eve, which is much more special, but is this now changing?

it’s got a lot worse since my long-ago childhood when my family didn’t get into Christmas mode until then. We also marked Halloween, but not in the OTT American way it’s done now. At least with commercial Halloween it keeps the Christmas stuff away until November, which is a small mercy I suppose!😀

It is not bad wording, it is a fundamental failure to understand our geography, our political union, social history and culture.
No wonder you are confused about what it means to be English.

Ha ha, no. In France and the supermarkets are full of Christmas chocolates - they appeared as soon as the Halloween sweets disappeared 🙄

I was just about to say the same about France! Garden centres are full of Christmas decor and shops have their decorations up.

I still think people in France buy fewer items and the decoration of houses is more ‘subtle’ than in the uk!

I've reported your post
Nothing could be further from the truth,I'm posting. in good faith

I think the same goes for many northern English communities. Certainly in my area (Liverpool) you’ll hear “Scouse, not English”, and that goes back to the Thatcher era and the destruction of our industries. People are generally very anti-establishment and dislike the royal family. The powers that be left our city to rot, so why should we have any loyalty to them? Our community is made up of descendants of immigrants who came from all over the world, but they are scousers and they are ‘our people’. This sets us apart from the rest of the country and our scouse culture is felt far more strongly than our British culture by most people here.

How many times would you like me to apologise..I've said sorry three times now on the thread .
I probably don't have a great grasp of things , hence why I'm here asking

Years ago people cooked in aluminium pans too and they survived!

My husband is an archaeologist so he’s up-to-speed with changing attitudes to the historical/cultural/ethnic make-up of the British Isles. He says that ‘Celtic’ is now best seen as a linguistic term only - there wasn’t a Celtic ‘race’, as such, and certainly Ireland and Scotland contain people of varying heritage. What we call the Scots were actually an Irish tribe who crossed to SW Scotland and their culture was different from the tribes in the Highlands, as well as from the rather mysterious Picts.

I think DNA has shown that, far from the invading Germanic tribes pushing all the British population into Wales, there were/are still great numbers of Romano-British people in what we now call England. So the Saxons etc invaded, but seem not to have displaced the indigenous British as much as we once thought.

We have varying cultures for sure within these islands, but we shouldn’t put too much emphasis on perceived ethnic differences. These have been over-emphasised in the past.

This. I just had a one word answer, really - "bantz". But I guess the word I would choose if i were to be slightly more highbrow is "irreverence". This answer is better though.

Oh dear…another illusion bites the dust!

Yes it’s interesting you should say that. My dad became convinced (for reasons best known to himself - maybe he suspected an affair) that we had Portuguese ancestry, so took a DNA test. Dad is ‘English’ in that his parents, grandparents, great grandparents, great great grandparents etc… going back some 400 years are all traced as being born in England, and not near the borders. His test came back 60% ‘English’ (Anglo Saxon), 30% ‘British Isles/Celtic’ and 10% Finnish (wtf?).

School fetes/summer fetes in general
bunting
tiny sandwiches eaten on a picnic blanket
living close enough to pop to the seaside for a dip
sitting on father christmas's knee
father christmas NOT SANTA
the nativity
visiting churches and cathedrals
parks
beer gardens
fish and chips
pubs that serve proper pub grub
town/city christmas decorations
picturesque towns/cities
national rail
complaining about the trains
complaining about the weather
sports day

Are we allowed to use the word 'banter' though? So many threads on this site where someone has taken contrived offence at a throwaway remark when in reality most people would either tell them to 'go away' using whatever words they were comfortable with or they would throw one back! When we lived in Germany, working with MOD, we were out for the evening and the German husband of one of the women said he knew when British people liked you, they didn't feel the need to be over polite to you!

@Ticklyoctopus That is very common. I’m completely English/Scottish/Irish/Welsh apart from 7% Swedish. Scandinavians (usually fishermen) would often come here and settle in Scotland/Eastern England. Most of us have a smidge of Scandi in us.

I believe you OP, if only because it's something that so many English (and other) people do unthinkingly! Look at all these endless lists of quintessentially English culture and history posted on here as 'British'.

For me personally, I'm Scottish - culturally and British - legally. Scottish doesn't exist as a nationality (yet) so I am a British citizen / national. My British passport is the legal identity and set of rights / responsibiltiies that I take through the world with me, but my Scottish culture and heritage is the sum total of my own personal version of everything that people mention - pints in the pub on a Saturday after the football / rugby, the smell of the breweries in Edinburgh on a cold winter day, the buildings of the Old Town glittering in the early evening as the sun goes down, the empty spaces of the moors and mountains, the colours of heather and granite and sparkling turquoise seas reflected in beautiful fabrics and landscape paintings, the stomping of the feet and clapping of hands at a wedding ceilidh, ham sandwiches, sausage rolls and endless cups of tea at a funeral, people saying 'aye' and 'ah ken' with a nod of their heads, nippy sweeties, lucky bags, ringing the bells at New Year, the pipes, giein' it laldy at a late-night lock-in, Walter Scott, Rabbie Burns and the whole clanjamfrie, 'gaun yersel' and 'kent his faither', the smell of my mums mince and tatties, 'come away in, you're freezing out there', and everything else that means HOME. No matter how far I wander.

Try writing your own list. What is home to you?

I don't know what it's like now but the museum on Albert Dock in Liverpool telling the story of those emigrating to the US in the most appalling conditions below deck, so well done, one felt the floor moving like the sea. Strangely enough the following years we went to Ellis Island and saw where many of them landed, it was an awful museum with little attempt to replicate what happened to those people when they landed in the New World. If it's improved in 30+ years please accept my apologies!

It was probably down to the degree each conquered tribe submitted/ resisted as to whether they were massacred/ exiled or assimilated. Plus the need to have a subordinate peasant population. (Incidentally, massive digression but I was enthralled, when visiting Mexico City, to find that the indigenous population there are still effectively Aztecs. Seems it was only the ruling class who were wiped out, whereas the survivors of all the Western diseases are all there. They still speak Nahautl, the Aztec language).

The story of the Cornish is interesting. Basically the same people as the Welsh and Bretons, Cornish used to be spoken all the way into Devon until King Aethelstan fixed the South western border of England at the Tamar in the 10th century. He then forced all the Cornish speakers back beyond the Tamar. They've recently done DNA studies and discovered that the genetic makeups of the populations of Cornwall and Devon are dramatically different.

I’ve lived in other countries and travelled a lot. When I’ve had conversations with non English people about what is English / England they usually say things like

• drink lots of tea
• London Buckingham palace
• lots of rain
• beautiful green countryside
• fish and chips (lots think this but 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️)
• English breakfast
• Union Jack
• the queen (as was)
• polite, say sorry lot
• queue