Your Favourite British Thing(s).

[Treeinthewoods]

I freakin' love British food. Shepard's Pie, Cottage Pie, Beef Wellington, Jellied Eel, Queen's Breakfast, Fish and Chips, Bangers and Mash, Pasties... you guys have the meat and two veg thing practically perfected. All you need is some good british BBQ, but it's hard to beat the US on that one.

And the pastries and sweets!

And the beer! Such good beer!

If I ever come over for tourist time I'll probably end up gaining thirty pounds in a week.

And in a totally off topic thing, if any English escapist's can tell me some of the best places in the country to eat (not tourist traps, places you actually like eating) I'll gladly buy you beers and food in exchange for directions.

 

[KimberlyGoreHound]

Monty Python, and the word bollocks.

 

[sixtysix]

oh oh oh I thought of something else: you sent all of your convicts to Australia and the rest of you stayed in Britain. I always laugh when I think about that.

 

[CombiBlood]

Alan Moore and Bond, James Bond.

 

[kim333]

I was going to say Peep Show and Hugh Laurie, then I realized we invented the fucking Television itself.

YEAH.

 

[Anchupom]

The Labour Party, Tea, The Who, Iron Maiden, The Levellers and our shear bloody mindedness.

Labour Party?
*ugh*
I distance myself from politics. Nasty stuff, bad for the health.

 

[CharrHawk164]

I was going to say Peep Show and Hugh Laurie, then I realized we invented the fucking Television itself.

YEAH.

But you can't have made great stuff to go on it

 

[Geekosaurus]

Spoiler: And I'm not even Scottish.

 

[Omega500]

Beans on toast, free banking, Fish and chips, Curry, NHS and the polish

 

[Anchupom]

I freakin' love British food. Shepard's Pie, Cottage Pie, Beef Wellington, Jellied Eel, Queen's Breakfast, Fish and Chips, Bangers and Mash, Pasties... you guys have the meat and two veg thing practically perfected. All you need is some good british BBQ, but it's hard to beat the US on that one.

And the pastries and sweets!

And the beer! Such good beer!

If I ever come over for tourist time I'll probably end up gaining thirty pounds in a week.

And in a totally off topic thing, if any English escapist's can tell me some of the best places in the country to eat (not tourist traps, places you actually like eating) I'll gladly buy you beers and food in exchange for directions.

Well what kind of food do you like? My family generally only go out for curry (one of Britain's finest foods. Of course.) so if you're headed up that road I can give you some advice.

 

[Danny Ocean]

Pretty much everything the BBC does.
James Bond.
Sherlock Holmes.
Geography- c'mon, you know we make the best maps. ;D
London- the most visited city in the world.

Spoiler: Huge image

Bigger. [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/London_skyline_2012_panorama.jpg]

Universities:

Spoiler: Click!

Oxford

Cambridge

UCL

...and more!

Spoiler: Wikipedia Inventions

The United Kingdom has played a leading role in the advancement of science.It led the industrial revolution and has produced many scientists and engineers credited with important advances, including;

-The laws of motion and illumination of gravity, by physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist and theologian, Sir Isaac Newton

Spoiler: Newton; what a badass!

-The unification of electromagnetism, by James Clerk Maxwell

-The discovery of hydrogen, by Henry Cavendish

-The steam locomotive, by Richard Trevithick and Andrew Vivian

-The theory of aerodynamics, by Sir George Cayley

-The world's first working television system, and colour television, by John Logie Baird

-The invention of the jet engine, by Frank Whittle

-Evolution by natural selection, by Charles Darwin

-The Turing machine, by Alan Turing, the basis of the modern computer.

-The invention of the hovercraft, by Christopher Cockerell

-The electric motor, by Michael Faraday, who largely made electricity viable for use in technology

-The first practical telephone, patented by Alexander Graham Bell.

-The structure of DNA, by Francis Crick and others

-The first public steam railway, by George Stephenson

-The invention of the World Wide Web, by Tim Berners-Lee.

-Theories in cosmology, quantum gravity and black holes, by Stephen Hawking

-The first commercial electrical telegraph, co-invented by Sir William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone.

-The invention of the incandescent light bulb, by Joseph Swan

-The creation of postage and modern postal service, by Sir Rowland Hill

-The discovery of penicillin, by biologist and pharmacologist, Sir Alexander Fleming.

Notable civil engineering projects, whose pioneers included Isambard Kingdom Brunel, contributed to the advancement of railway transport systems. Other advances pioneered in the UK include the marine chronometer, the jet engine, modern bicycle, electric lighting, steam turbine, electromagnet, stereo sound, motion picture, the screw propeller, the internal combustion engine, military radar, electronic computer, photography, aeronautics, soda water, IVF, nursing, antiseptic surgery, vaccination, antibiotics.

Plus, we make the best music in the world. Sure, there's a lot of stabbings and such, but generally speaking the nation is doing pretty well!

 

[Kayevcee]

The weather. No, really. We have the most productive agricultural land ON EARTH. We get plenty of rain and just enough sun and occasional fog and slippy ice and occasional snow. We might have one heatwave and one paralysing snowfall a year, occasionally on consecutive weeks. Unless you work on a fishing boat or an oil rig it's never life threatening- just interesting and varied and generally pleasant.

I say this as a man who has spent most of the last 4 months in Saudi Arabia where it is blindingly hot and cloudless every. Damn. Day. Some days there's a cooling breeze but if it ever gets up past 20mph, we're talking sandstorms. Sod that for a lark: give me freezing winds and lashing rain any day. Maybe not EVERY day, but the beauty of British weather is that, if you don't like it, you just wait half an hour.

-Nick

 

[robot slipper]

Queues, free healthcare, curry, pubs, the ability to use and detect sarcasm, constantly talking about the weather

 

[googleit6]

Muse and Simon Pegg and anything relating to the two.

 

[Anchupom]

it's the accent
no I'm serious I love the way you people talk
everything is better when you say it in a British accent

my least favorite thing about Brittan is America...
I hate to say it but you dropped the ball on that one guys

You my good sir (or madam), are quite utterly brilliant.
And why yes, I am british.

 

[SuperCombustion]

Tea, top hats, phone boxes and the ability to say 'herbs' like how its spelt. Shakespear, the Beatles, Sarcasm done right, buses, Marillion, Simon Pegg, insider knowlede on Big Ben being the bell and not the clock, fish and chips, Monty Python, Yahtzee, Queuing and we have a neat accent.

 

[Sebenko]

Me.

Damn right.

 

[trooper6]

Considering the tea plant is native to East and South Asia...it isn't unproblematically British, to say the least.

But I'll go with: Diana Rigg. The Avengers. Shakespeare. Oscar Wilde. Noel Coward. Harold Pinter. Lulu. Charles Dickens. Eastenders.

 

[Kayevcee]

Pretty much everything the BBC does.

Oh man, how could I forget the Beeb? Our microbiology lecturer showed a bit from Blue Planet on Deep Sea Angler Fish, to demonstrate the unusual attributes of bioluminescent symbiotes. It was several minutes of wild and woolly deep-sea organisms and their strange bioluminous displays.

One of the Saudi students asked "how did they get these videos?"

The lecturer replied, "They're the BBC."

Nuff said.

-Nick