10 things Britain does better than the rest of the world
In recent years, Telegraph Travel has repeatedly highlighted the many ways in which other countries outshine Britain. Germany’s railways are more reliable (despite recent problems), and its autobahns far superior to our motorways. France’s villages have more vigour, and its waiters (though prone to snootiness) are infinitely more competent. Greek cuisine is healthier, and its people more welcoming. Americans are more patriotic, and their national parks put ours well and truly in the shade.
But there are also plenty of reasons for Britons to be boastful. Here are just 10 (plus a few “honourable mentions”). Please feel free to add your own, or disagree with our choices, in the comments below.
1. Temperateness
If, from within Britain, it might presently seem that the country is on the highway to hell – NHS in intensive care, drugs, thugs, taxes, gender uncertainty, Prince Andrew, Lord knows what else – from outside, things don’t quite look that way. There’s a longer-running reality perceived by those who don’t follow the UK’s daily twists and turns – and an element of that reality, of Britishness itself, is what I’d call our “temperateness”. It’s a world-beater.
Britain, most of the time, is not a land of excess. Despite the present crop of outrages, we remain a beacon of moderation, admirably benign of weather (hurricane-free), of geography (nothing tops 1,345m, a pimple in Alpine terms) and of politics (Sunak to Starmer without a single shot fired).
We haven’t done revolutions for ages, or much in the way of civil strife. Tranquillity, even stability, is so rooted in our past that we get incensed about cycle lanes. Elsewhere, existential conflicts are resolved, or not, with flame throwers or by chucking bricks at the constabulary. In Britain, we’d rather have a cup of tea or a glass of wine, and maybe get our dose of disgust not from corruption, oppression or state brutality, but from the weekly results of Strictly.
Such equanimity means we might be polite, informal, usually welcoming, self-deprecating in ways other nations just don’t get, mainly tolerant, generous… oh, and funny about, well, everything. It is upon such a temperate basis that we can generate, and absorb, planet-leading extravagance in certain fields: rock ’n’ roll, fashion and soccer to name but many. They’re dancing on the deck but the ship itself remains rock steady.
Anthony Peregrine
2. Ordnance Survey maps
Don’t just take my word for it. When the military Board of Ordnance set about creating detailed, accurate maps of Great Britain in the late 18th century, it was with the idea that they would be “the honour of the nation”. Job done. Ordnance Survey maps are things of sublime beauty.
Yes, they might have started out being used by Army types, but now they’re the magic keys for anyone wanting to explore any part of the country. They show windmills and industrial estates, differentiate between bracken and scrub, indicate ancient earthworks, plot every church. And they show you where you can go – footpaths, bridleways and byways spidering across their grid squares. They aren’t just maps, they are endless possibilities.
Sarah Baxter
3. Pubs
Bars. Rum shacks. Chiringuitos. Tasting rooms. Karaoke lounges. They all have their place (well, maybe not the last one), but they’re not pubs, are they?
That’s because the classic British boozer is as unexportable as black pudding or Alan Carr, and it simply can’t be replicated in laboratory conditions.
Sure, you could collect the ingredients – warm beer, bad wine, a cocktail list that consists of G&T or JD & Coke? Check. Stale-smelling carpets, wobbly tables, a sink in the toilets that makes you want to wash your hands after washing your hands in? Check. Indifferent staff, vaguely threatening customers and a dog? Check. But throw them together and you don’t get a pub, you get a ghoulish Frankenstein’s-monster mockery (like, say, the Churchill, “New York’s finest English Tavern” – which gets things so badly wrong that it proudly hosts baby showers and children’s parties…).
No, a proper pub needs all those elements (plus, obviously, a cribbage board); but, like a well-poured pint of stout, it must be left to settle: 200-odd years should do it. Then (slightly thirsty perhaps), creak open the door to find yourself in the cosiest and most convivial place on earth, where the conversation and the laughter and the log fire crackle like the pork scratchings. Welcome home; mine’s a foaming tankard of nut-brown ale please.
Ed Grenby
4. Music
Yes, fair enough, New York has thrown out the odd decent band. And Los Angeles used to do a really nice line in preposterously coiffured men whose collective hairspray use was largely responsible for the the hole in the ozone layer (and whose songs seemed to bring on severe cases of constipation, so pained were their facial expressions as they “ripped” into yet another endless widdly-widdly guitar solo).
But the fact remains that you can point to just about any location on the British map, and a brilliant musical act will have emerged from its streets at some juncture in the past 70 years. Manchester, London and Glasgow are a ceaseless swirl of melodic creativity. Bristol was the epicentre of trip-hop cool for much of the Nineties (and will be so again if Massive Attack ever release another album). Oxford shrugged off its gowns and mortarboards to give the world Radiohead. And Liverpool produced a bunch of likely lads who did OK in the Sixties, though their name escapes me.
But put it another way. If the suburban streets of Bromley – Bromley! – can shape the childhood of a star as radical, forward-thinking and relentlessly changing as David Bowie, then, yes, the discussion ends right here. Mic drop.
Chris Leadbeater
5. Eccentricity
Sure, Japan has toilet-themed cafés and Iceland a museum of ancient phalluses, but which other nation’s inhabitants roll peas, snorkel through bogs, or dance around each other while trying to avoid being hit by a beer-soaked cloth (dwile-flonking, anyone?), in the name of entertainment?
Chalk it up to our island-nation mentality, or all those rainy days with nothing to occupy us but an Airfix model, but Britons do eccentricity with unmatched brio.
Best of all, it’s here to be enjoyed by the casual visitor. So whether it’s niche museums such as the Pencil Museum in Keswick, the Dog Collar Museum at Leeds Castle (which, in true British style, is in fact in Kent) and the Phone Box Museum in Cardigan; or madcap festivals like Wormcharming at Blackawton, Aberdeenshire’s Fireball Whirling, or the famous Cheese-Rolling shindig in Gloucestershire, this island is a hymn to all that’s weird and wonderful in human tastes. Now, which dwile-flonker nabbed my knee bells?
Sally Howard
6. Non-league football
Is there anything sweeter in this life than warming your hands over a cup of hot Bovril, a woolly scarf draped around your neck, shouting “wey” as a goalkeeper boots a muddy football out of the stadium and into a nearby garden? I highly doubt it.
Whenever a friend from overseas asks for tips on what to do in Britain, top of the list is to attend a non-league football match. There are around 1,000 non-league teams across England, Wales and Scotland, and it is in these tiny grounds where you will find the true spirit of football.
What makes non-league special is that it’s generally cheap, family-friendly (many have raffles) and home and away fans mingle in a jovial atmosphere, all to the tune of drums and witty chants. Many non-league teams retain the man-and-his-dog vibe, but some are ushering in a new era – Forest Green Rovers is the world’s first vegan football club, and Lewes FC pays its women the same as its men.
In many ways, the quality of the football is neither here nor there, although the prospect that Havant & Waterlooville could one day end up playing at the Etihad Stadium in the FA Cup is part of the magic. That, and the thrill that a misfired ball could whack your Bovril from your hand at any second.
Greg Dickinson
7. Museums
You might get some pushback from fans of the Hermitage, the Louvre, the Prado and the Met when it comes to a ranking of world-class museums, but overall, not only does Britain have institutions to rival all these, but the best ones are free to all-comers. And, putting all the recent controversies about restitution aside, that fundamental principle of making the greatest artefacts and works of art freely available to all is at the heart of what shapes our national sense of the importance of visual culture.
It is deeply ingrained in our history. Twenty years ago we were celebrating the 250th anniversary of the British Museum, this year it’s the bicentenary of the National Gallery. And let’s not forget the wonderful National Gallery in Edinburgh – it marks the 175th year of its foundation in 2025, while the V&A will reach the same milestone two years later.
And these great institutions have a star-studded supporting cast. In London alone we have world-class museums in both the Tate Modern and Tate Britain, the National Portrait Gallery, the Natural History and Science museums, the Wallace Collection and Kenwood House (all free). And while the Courtauld Gallery and Dulwich Picture Gallery (which opened in 1817 and is the oldest public art gallery in England) do charge, they also have fabulous collections that are more than worth the admission cost.
Nick Trend
8. Sense of humour
I suppose you need a sense of humour in this country these days, don’t you. Perhaps nowhere personifies our brand of browbeaten, dry wit like Ilkeston, the down-at-heel Derbyshire town whose top-rated attraction is a hole in the wall. Satirical rave reviews on TripAdvisor are a wry lament to civic decline. “It’s typical of local humour,” one resident told me, pointing to a gnome-filled roundabout as another example.
Like cheeses, most regions have their own flavour of humour. In St Agnes, Cornwall, locals excitedly told me about the annual Tour de Piss, a boozy fancy dress bike race between pubs. In Gloucestershire, the local humour felt similarly dangerous as I joined others chasing a wheel of cheese down Cooper’s Hill.
An ex-winner told me that he didn’t even like double Gloucester while showing me a video of him being knocked unconscious during a previous event. “We thought he was dead,” laughed his mate. Someone did snap their ankle during my race. “This is what it means to be British,” a spectator declared as the poor bloke was stretchered away. God help us.
In nearby Wales, they snorkel in bogs for laughs, while Edinburgh devotes itself to comedy every August. The funniest Fringe joke is hotly anticipated. “I was going to sail around the globe in the world’s smallest ship but I bottled it” being this year’s winner.
Gavin Haines
9. Parish churches
It’s raining in the tiny provincial village. The shop is a Spar. The pub closed five years ago. The bus comes once a day, four days a week. What to do in such a place? The best answer, often, is to step through a lychgate – the symbolic portal to the sacred – and walk up the path through the graveyard to the church door. The relief of finding it open turns quickly to something deeper. So many places have lost pubs and post offices, shops and services, that parish churches have gained immensely in value.
Free to enter, focused on anything but consuming, and gloriously unsurveilled, they are survivors from a lost world. Their Gothic and perpendicular exteriors give a village something monumental, a witness to centuries and communities. Their interiors – the whiff of damp or incense, the glint of silver, the creaky pews – are, for some, a flashback to childhood, Confirmation and Sunday School.
Many people, in the “matting, seats, and stone, and little books”, find themselves feeling like Philip Larkin in “Church Going”: wondering, at a loss, awkwardly reverent.
It is an extraordinary gift to humanity in a clamorous and phone-twitching world to provide a safe, dry, special, almost magical, space in which to spend half an hour.
Our old parish churches pip so much other heritage and allow a solemn silence often impossible in great city cathedrals. Without them, British villages would be ghostly and quite hopeless, unworthy of the visitor’s patience and time.
Chris Moss
10. Plugs
Sitting under my desk is a grim little Tupperware box, full of the saddest souvenirs of world travel. Travel adaptors are often the last thing I pack before setting off overseas – unlike sunglasses or swimming trunks, packing them comes with no foretaste of fun. I have a small alphabet’s worth of the things – the two-pronged Europe Type Es that droop out of sockets: the American Type Bs that – considered from one particular angle – look like a disappointed face.
All of which make me long for the British Type G, widely considered by sparkies I’ve spoken to as one of the best in the world for their stability and safety credentials. Though, to be fair, they are not totally exclusive to the UK. Years ago, needing to charge my toothbrush in Kuala Lumpur, I searched for a socket, saw an old friend above the skirting board, and immediately felt earthed.
Oli Smith
Honourable mentions
What else do we do better than the rest of the world? How about silly place names (step forward Nether Wallop, Great Snoring, Crackpot and Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch). And quizzes, from the Monday night triumvirate of Mastermind, Only Connect and University Challenge to those held in pubs up and down the land – or on Zoom during the pandemic.
There’s our royalty, and the associated pomp (don’t tell us you weren’t moved by the King’s Coronation, featuring an armed Penny Mordaunt and the haunting sounds of Handel’s Zadok the Priest). Our ability to invent sports and then fail to win at them (snooker and darts excluded) is unrivalled. We’ve also perfected the art of afternoon tea – and of cooked breakfasts. And then there’s our mighty castles, our quaint villages, our dry stone walls, our hedges, our garden centres, our roundabouts, our cheeses…
