Any visitor to Britain will soon understand the locals’ obsession with  weather.Extremes of hot or cold are rare, but variation is constant. The key word is changeable: the weather can be bad one minute, great the next. It wouldn’t be unusual in April, for example, for the morning to be warm enough for T-shirts, lunch time to be cloudy, the afternoon see a dash of rain and drop in temperature, and the day polished off by a dump of snow in the evening.Despite apparent randomness, there is a seasonal pattern. Rain falls less often in summer (June to August), and there’s normally more sunshine, although there’ll be cloudy days too. Conversely, winter (November to February) may enjoy fantastic clear spells between bouts of snow, while spring (March to May) or autumn (September to October) can sometimes produce
the best weather of the year. There are also variations over distance: southern England might be chilly, while northern Scotland enjoys a heat wave. Or vice versa. Be prepared for anything and you won’t get a surprise. With all that in mind, May to September is undoubtedly the best period to travel in Britain. July and August are busiest (it’s school holiday time), especially in coastal towns, national parks, and historic cities like Oxford, Edinburgh and York. In April and October you take a chance on the weather but avoid crowds, although some hotels and attractions close mid-October to Easter, and tourist offices have limited hours.Overall, the least hospitable months for visitors are November to February. It’s cold in the south, very cold in the north, and days are short. In Scotland, north Wales and the hills of northern England, roads can sometimes be closed by snow. Reaching the islands off the Scottish mainland (and occasionally other parts of Britain) can also be a problem as high winds disrupt ferry services.
For winter visits, London and the big cities are an exception – they’re busy all the time, with such a lot to see the weather is immaterial. Besides, you’re almost as likely to have a damp day in June as you are in January…

If you’re a global traveller, whatever your budget you’ll know that Britain is expensive compared with many other countries. But don’t let that put you off. If funds are tight you’ll still have a great trip with some forward planning, a bit of shopping around and a modicum ofcommon sense. A lot of stuff is cheap or good value, and some is completely free. The following gives some guidelines; for more details see the Directory and Transport chapters.
For midrange travellers, basic hotels are about £20 to £50 per person, except in London, where midrange hotels start at around £80, and around £100 gets you something pretty decent for the night, although you could easily spend more. When it comes to eating, a decent three-course meal with wine in a smart restaurant will set you back about £20 to £30 per person. In London this jumps to about £50, although if you choose carefully you can still get a great meal (with a glass or two of wine) for around £25. Of course, you can go wild at somewhere outrageously posh or trendy, and not get much change from £125.Backpackers on a tight budget need £30 a day for bare survival in London, with dorm beds from £15, basic sustenance £10, and transport around £5 unless you prefer to hoof it. Whatever your bracket, extras in London might include clubbing (£5 to £10, up to £20 at weekends), a pint in a pub (£2.50 to £3) or admission to museums and galleries (£10 to £20 a day, though many places don’t charge). Out of London, costs drop. Shoestringers need around £25 per day for hostels and food. Midrangers will be fine on £50 to £75 per day, allowing £20 to £30 per person for B&B accommodation, £10 to £15 for lunch, snacks and drinks, £10 to £20 for an evening meal. Admission fees are the same for everyone – work on £10 per day. Travel costs depend on transport choice. Trains can cost anything from £5 to £50 per 100 miles, depending when you buy your ticket. Long-distance buses (called coaches in Britain) cost about half the train fare for an equivalent journey. Car drivers should allow £10 per 100 miles for fuel, plus around £5 per day for parking. Rental costs £20 to £50 per day, depending on model and duration.

 Meanwhile, away from the emerging kingdoms of England, the Celts on the outer fringes of the British Isles (particularly in Ireland) had kept alive their own distinct yet Roman-influenced culture, along with the ideals of Christianity. And while the Anglo-Saxons took advantage of the post-Roman void in eastern Britain, towards the end of the 5th century others played the same
game on the west side of the island: the Scotti people (from today’s Ireland) invaded the land of the Picts (today’s Wales and Scotland).In response to the invasion, people from the kingdom of Gododdin (in today’s Scotland) came to northwest Wales. Their initial plan was to drive out the invaders, but they stayed and settled in the area, which became the kingdom of Gwynedd. (The modern county in northern Wales still proudly bears this name.)The struggle between Welsh settlers and Irish raiders along the coast carried on for the rest of the Dark Ages. At the same time, more settlers came to Wales from today’s Cornwall and western France, and Christian missionaries arrived from Ireland in the 6th and 7th centuries.While these newcomers arrived from the west and south, the people of Wales were also under pressure to the east – harassed by the Anglo-Saxons of England pretty much constantly for hundreds of years. In response, by the 8th century the disparate tribes of Wales had started to band together and sow the seeds of nationhood. They called themselves  cymry (fellow
countrymen), and today Cymru is the Welsh word for Wales.

   Queen Victoria died in 1901 and ever-expanding Britain died with her. The new king, Edward VII, ushered in the relaxed new Edwardian era – and a long period of decline.In Continental Europe, four restless military powers (Russia, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Germany) focused their sabre-rattling on the Balkan states, and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914 finally sparked a clash which became the Great War we now call WWI. When German forces entered Belgium, on their way to invade France, soldiers from Britain and Allied countries were drawn into the war – a vicious conflict of stalemate and horrendous slaughter – most infamously on the killing fields of Flanders and the beaches of Gallipoli.By the war’s weary end in 1918 more than a million Britons had died (not to mention millions more from many other countries) and there was hardly a street or village untouched by death, as the sobering lists of names on war memorials all over Britain still show. The conflict added ‘trench warfare’ to the dictionary, and further deepened the huge gulf that had existed between ruling and working classes since the days of the Norman feudal system.
 

When it comes to family life, many British people regard the ‘Victorian values’ of the late 19th century as an idyllic benchmark – a time of perfect morals and harmonious nuclear families, a high point from which the country has been sliding ever since. As recently as the 1960s, only 2% of couples would live in sin’ before getting married, whereas by 2004 ‘cohabiting’ (there’s still not a proper word for it) was perfectly acceptable in most circles; around 60% of couples who marry are already living together, and at any given time about a third of all couples living together are unmarried.In line with this, the number of unmarried couples having children has
also increased in the last 40 years; whereas ‘illegitimate’ children were comparatively rare and a social stigma in the 1960s, today about 40% of births in the UK each year are to unmarried couples. The ‘pro-family’ lobby argues that married couples provide more stability and a better environment for children. But marriage apparently provides no guarantees: currently about
one in three British marriages ends in divorce. All the above applies to heterosexual marriage of course. It’s been legal for gay or lesbian couples to get hitched only since the 2005 Civil Partnership Act came into force. This was a landmark step, but there’s still a way to go before full tolerance and equality is reached. It’s a similar situation when it comes to race. General tolerance prevails in most parts of Britain, with commercial organisations and official bodies such as the police trying hard to stamp out discrimination. But bigotry can still lurk close to the surface: far-right political parties won several seats in the local council elections of 2006, and it’s not unusual to hear people openly discuss other races in quite unpleasant terms – in smart country pubs as much as rough city bars. And while it’s no longer OK for comedians to tell racist jokes on prime-time TV (as it was until the 1980s), this type of humour still goes down well in some quarters.Along with race, another major issue in Britain is health – with obesity a hot topic on everyone’s lips. Currently over 60% of the adult population is overweight, and almost 25% is clinically obese. In late 2005 the UK had the fastest growing rate of obesity of all developed nations.

Britain’s  population is around 58 million, and growth has been virtually static in recent years (if you don’t count the annual influx of about 30 million tour-ists). The highest concentration is in England, which has a population of 50 million, with London the largest city in the country. The other main centres in England are Birmingham (Britain’s second-largest city), Manchester and Sheffield (ranking third and fourth in size), with Liverpool and Leeds not far away – in distance and size.Wales has around three million people, with the population concentrated along the coast between Cardiff (the Welsh capital) and Swansea and in the former mining valleys running north from there. Scotland has around five million people, with the population concentrated in and around the cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee. Scotland’s Highland region is Britain’s most sparsely populated area, with an average of just 20 people per sq mile, a legacy of the notorious Clearances (see  p897 ).
A major characteristic of Britain’s population is the so-called ‘north–south divide’, in reality a split between wealthy southeast England and the rest of the UK. For example, around London there are towns where high-tech jobs are on the rise and there’s less than 1% unemployment. In sharp contrast, eco-nomic depression is a major issue in parts of the Midlands, northern England, south and north Wales and many parts of urban and rural Scotland – an ‘archipelagoof deprivation’ according to one report. However, this split is oversimplified, and across the country there are pock-ets of affluence in ‘poor’ areas, and zones of poverty just a few blocks from Millionaires’ Row. But, overall, even though the cost of living in London and
the southeast is much higher than elsewhere (double the price for a beer, 10 times more for a house), and despite government efforts to relocate public- and private-sector jobs to ‘the regions’, people – and the work opportunities that attract them – still seem relentlessly drawn to the capital and its environs. Meanwhile, and contrary to expectations, an even more significant migration is under way. In the last decade, over one million people in Britain have moved from urban to rural areas. A 2004 report from the Countryside Agency says this is four times more than the number moving from north to south. The new country-dwellers seek a better standard of living, and many can work from home via phone and the internet. Others use their skills to set up small businesses, providing new employment opportunities for the locals – especially valuable in rural areas where traditional jobs such as farming are on
the wane. But there are downsides, too, most notably the rise in rural house prices. This ispushing property beyond the reach of local inhabitants and forcing them to move to the towns that the incomers have just vacated.

A wit once said that football was a gentlemen’s game played by hooligans, while  rugby was the other way around. That may be true, and rugby is very popular, especially since England became world champions in 2004; it’s worth catching a game for the display of skill (OK, and brawn), and the fun atmosphere on the terraces. Tickets cost around £15 to £40 depending on the club’s status and fortunes. There are two variants of the game: rugby union is played in southern England, Wales and Scotland, while rugby league is the main sport in northern England, although there is a lot of crossover. Many rules and tactics of both ‘codes’ aresimilar, although in rugby league (unlike rugby union) tackled players regain their feet, and heel the ball backwards to a team-mate. After six tackles, the other team gets possession of the ball.
Other major differences include there being only 13 players in each team (ostensibly making the game faster), while rugby union sides have 15 players each.The main season for club matches is roughly September to Easter, while the international rugby union calendar is dominated by the annual Six Nations Championship (England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France and Italy) between January and April. It’s usual for the Scots to support Wales, or vice versa, when either team is playing ‘old enemy’ England. Scots will enthusiastically support France too – keeping alive memories of the Auld Alliance but it’s all very good-natured, really.
 

The  Church of England (or Anglican Church) was founded in the 16th century at the behest of Henry VIII, and today remains wealthy and influential – even in these increasingly secular times. It’s traditionally conservative, and predominantly Conservative (sometimes called ‘the Tory Party at prayer’); only since 1994 have women been ordained as priests. The debate has now moved on to the rights and wrongs of gay clergy.In the 2001 national census, around 35 million people stated their religion as Christian, and although many write ‘C of E’ when filling in forms, only about a million attend Sunday services. Other Christian faiths include Roman
Catholic (about 10% of the population), plus sizable groups of Methodists, Baptists and other nonconformists – most notably in Wales, where the An-glican Church ceased to be the established church way back in the 1920s, and the Church–Chapel divide between the Protestant and nonconformist faiths is still clearly evident. In Scotland you’ll find the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland with its spin-off minorities, the United Free Presbyterians and the Free Church of Scotland (known as the Wee Frees). Generally, attendances are down every year at mainstream churches across Britain, with evangelical and charismatic churches the only ones attracting growing congregations.The 2001 census also recorded around 1.5 million Muslims in Britain (about 3% of the population). Other faiths include Hindu (1%), Sikh (0.7%), Jewish (0.5%) and Buddhist (0.3%). Nowadays more non-Christians regularly
visit their places of worship than do all the Anglicans, Catholics, Methodists and Baptists combined – especially if you include those druids at Stonehenge, and all those wags that amusingly wrote ‘Jedi Knight’ in the ‘Other’ category on the census form.

Few cities can take the breath away quite like Cambridge. It’s not just its tightly packed core
of exquisite architecture, or even the mindboggling mass of brain power that has passed through its world-famous university, but it’s also the sensation of drowning in history, tradition and quirky ritual that only seems to deepen the more you discover. But so too there is plentiful opportunity to come up for air, relaxing in the manicured college gardens, punting along the beautiful river ‘Backs’ and roaming the lush water meadows that run out of the city.And of course Cambridge is no mere repository of history and charm, it is very much a living city; itsnarrow streets are alive with the click and whirr of cyclists. The river is clogged with red-faced rowers, drifting punts and on occasion floundering freshmen. Col-lege porters still potter around in bowler hats, while gowned students wine and dine in cav-ernous medieval halls. Historic pubs echo with the same equal mix of intellectual banter and rowdy merrymaking that they have for centuries. And a new generation of designer boutiques, coffee houses and slick nightlife venues is finding its niche in among the in-triguing passageways and medieval doorways of the old town.While you’ll find allthese qualities and more in ‘the other place’ (as rival Oxford is referred to here), Cambridge isthe more concentrated of England’s two great university cities, and in our humble opinion, farthe prettier

 London has a buzz unlike any other European city. It’s fashion forward, ethnically diverse and
artistically pioneering, while its unique geographical position between Continental Europe and the USA gives it the best of both cultural worlds. Hollywood stars are queuing up to tread the West End boards yet cheap flights link the capital easily to European cities and beer still runs on tap. Londoners are a proud lot, and rightly so.With gastropubs, dim-sum joints and gourmet-burger places continuing to propagate, a multitude of cuisines on your plate and a raft of celebrity chefs dishing up, the restaurant scene is five-star. For night-owls there’s excellent comedy, theatre, superclubs, DJ bars, and a growing number of ‘activity venues’ where you can bowl, skate or sing while you drink. Shopaholics can get their fix here with internationally respected home-grown designers, affordable catwalk copies, tantalising food halls and Aladdin’s cave markets. The museums are first-rate, with vast, fascinating galleries you could lose yourself in and world-class ex-hibitions. Glittering modern architecture continues to enhance the skyline with the Swiss Re building and City Hall. Yes, the city is eye-bogglingly huge and teeming with people but its vibrant multicultural-ism is a vital part of London’s identity. With so many different communities and neighbour-hoods, as comic Jimmy Carr says, ‘even a local can feel like a tourist’. Having won the 2012 Olympics bid and largely survived acts of terrorism, London is sailing high on a wave of determination, optimism and glee. Lucky you, coming along for the ride.

North Wales is a magical mix of medieval heritage and outstanding natural beauty, where you’re never far from golden beaches or soaring summits. Hikers, climbers, cyclists and allmanner of adrenaline junkies flock here from miles around. Snowdonia National Park is the crowning glory. Here, the highest peaks in Wales and England jut magnificently to the heav-ens – all too often set against moody, overcast skies. The Rivers Treweryn and Dee provide invigorating rafting and canoeing, while the less energetic can ride some of Britain’s most scenic railways, of which the Ffestiniog and Cambrian Coast lines are the finest.History hounds will love the otherworldly charms of the formidable castles at Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech and Beaumaris, and the wonderfully over-elaborate Portmeirion, an Italianate village in a romantic seaside setting.The northern coast is best known for the Victorian splendour of Llandudno, a classical British resort town. To the east, the impeccable Erddig country house and bustling town of Llangollen, with its International Eisteddfod, vie for attention with the spectacular mountains of the west.To the northwest lies the most ardent Welsh-speaking area of the country. The mountains that hypnotise today’s walkers and rock climbers also defied the marauding English invaders of the 15th century, and the spirit remains even among the modern-day youth. The Llŷn Peninsula, wild, rocky and less frequented, remains particularly proud.

For years gritty, grimy old Bristol has been the ugly sister of Britain’s cities, outclassed by Bath, outsmarted by London and upstaged bythe rejuvenated cities of Newcastle and Manchester to the north. But the fortunes of this old industrial city have changed dramatically in recent years, and the transformation that’s taken place over the last decade is pretty There’s a new sense of swagger and self-belief around Bristol these days; while the once-great trades of shipbuilding, manufacturing and the railways have long since sailed upriver, the city has steadily reclaimed its rightful place as an economic powerhouse, gastronomic centre and a cultural force to be reckoned with. The crumbling docks have been prettified and polished up; the streets are packed with cutting-edge restaurants, designer bars and world-class museums; and the city’s music, media and nightlife scenes are all showing the rest of the country how things should be done. It’s real, raw and just a little rough around the edges, but if you really want to know exactly where Britain’s at right now, then Bristol is hard to beat.