United Kingdom

Home of Big Ben, the royal family and the English language

The United Kingdom is an island nation made of 4 parts: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. English, spoken by half the world, comes from here. The king lives here, along with the Big Ben clock and red double-decker buses. The British invented football, the train, television and the World Wide Web. Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes are heroes created by English writers. It rains often, so an umbrella is always handy.

Capital: London. Language: English.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland covers 243,610 km² with 67 million people, a constitutional monarchy (one of the oldest parliamentary traditions, Magna Carta 1215) of 4 constituent countries. History: Stonehenge, Roman Britain, the Normans in 1066, the union of England and Scotland in 1707, the Industrial Revolution (18th century — the steam engine, the first railway in 1825), the British Empire (25% of the world's land in the 1920s, 'on which the sun never set'), World War II (Churchill), the EU 1973–2020 (Brexit). Science: Newton, Darwin, Faraday, Turing, the structure of DNA, penicillin, the WWW (Tim Berners-Lee, 1989). Culture: Shakespeare, the Beatles, the Premier League, the BBC, Oxford and Cambridge (12th–13th centuries). Economy: 6th in the world; London a financial centre; the pound sterling is the oldest currency. With Uzbekistan: the 'Great Game' history (19th century — Stoddart and Conolly in Bukhara), the British Council, English-language education.

Fun facts

• The World Wide Web was invented by Englishman Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.
• A century ago the British Empire covered a quarter of the world's land.
• Oxford University is over 900 years old — the oldest in the English-speaking world.