Arts and Culture

Audience seated inside a concert hall during an orchestral performance, evoking the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall · Photograph by Alev Takil. Unsplash Licence. unsplash.com

Music occupies a central place in British cultural life, with a tradition that runs from classical composers through folk song, jazz, and contemporary pop. Live music of every kind is programmed across the country throughout the year, and the UK sits comfortably among the most productive music-making nations in the world.

At the classical end of the spectrum, the eight-week summer festival known as the Proms is an annual fixture. Concerts take place at a number of venues, the Royal Albert Hall in London foremost among them. The series has been run by the BBC since 1927, and its final concert — the Last Night of the Proms — is broadcast on television to a very wide audience.

Popular music — folk, jazz, and rock and pop — has flourished in Britain through the course of the 20th century. Since the 1960s, British pop in particular has been one of the country's most distinctive cultural exports. Bands such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones from that decade remain influential both at home and internationally, and successive British musical movements have continued to innovate: the Punk movement of the late 1970s was followed by the boy-band and girl-band wave of the 1990s and by steady evolution since.

Large-capacity venues across the UK host major music events year-round. Wembley Stadium in north-west London, The O2 in Greenwich in south-east London, and the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre (SECC) in Glasgow are three of the most prominent. Every summer brings festival season, with Glastonbury, the Isle of Wight Festival and the V Festival among the best-known outdoor events.

The Welsh-language cultural tradition is represented by the National Eisteddfod of Wales, an annual festival of music, dance, art and original performance held largely in Welsh and featuring set competitions for Welsh poetry. For contemporary awards, the Mercury Music Prize is handed out each September for the best album of the year from the UK or Ireland, and the Brit Awards is an annual ceremony honouring (among other categories) best British group and best British solo artist.

Towns and cities across the UK support working theatres, ranging from the small and community-run to the large and metropolitan. Theatres are a recognisable feature of the local cultural landscape, staging both professional productions and amateur work. In London, the concentration of theatres around the West End district — widely nicknamed 'Theatreland' — is particularly well known.

British musical theatre has a strong tradition stretching back well into the 19th century. Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas of that period — HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado among them — poked often-sharp fun at the politics and social pretensions of the day. In the 20th and 21st centuries, Andrew Lloyd Webber's shows have written a further chapter in the British musical, finding worldwide audiences.

A distinctively British seasonal theatre form is the pantomime. Produced in many theatres over the Christmas period, pantomimes are light-hearted plays drawn from fairy tales and threaded with music and comedy, aimed at family audiences. One of the traditional characters of a pantomime is 'the Dame' — always a female character but always played, by convention, by a male actor.

The Edinburgh Festival is mounted every summer in the Scottish capital. It is actually not a single festival but a cluster of overlapping arts and cultural festivals; the largest and most widely known of them is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (commonly just 'the Fringe'), a showcase of mainly theatre and comedy performances that often features experimental work and first-run productions.

At the awards end, the Laurence Olivier Awards are handed out annually at a London venue across a range of categories — best director, best actor, best actress and others. They are named after the British stage and screen actor Sir Laurence Olivier (later Lord Olivier), who is most associated with his celebrated performances in Shakespeare.

Through the Middle Ages, most art produced in Britain was religious in orientation — wall paintings in churches and illuminations in religious books were the dominant forms. Much of that medieval religious art was destroyed or whitewashed after the Protestant Reformation, but wealthy families increasingly began to collect paintings and sculptures of other kinds, laying the ground for a secular collecting tradition.

Today, works by both British and international artists are on show in galleries around the country. Some of the most significant national galleries are the National Gallery, Tate Britain and Tate Modern (all in London), the National Museum in Cardiff, and the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Contemporary British art has its own dedicated award: the Turner Prize, founded in 1984 and named after Joseph Turner. Four artists are shortlisted for the prize each year and their work shown at Tate Britain ahead of the announcement. The Turner Prize is regarded as one of the most prestigious visual-art awards in Europe, and previous winners include Damien Hirst and Richard Wright.

A major 19th-century artistic movement was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, active in the second half of the century. Its members painted finely detailed pictures on religious and literary themes in unusually bright and jewel-like colours. The group included Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Sir John Millais.

Tower Bridge over the River Thames in London, near the Tower of London · Photograph by Robert Bye. Unsplash Licence. unsplash.com

Britain's built heritage is rich and stylistically varied. Medieval Britain produced great Gothic cathedrals and churches, many of which remain standing today — Durham, Lincoln, Canterbury and Salisbury are leading examples. The White Tower at the Tower of London is a surviving instance of a Norman castle keep, built under orders of William the Conqueror shortly after the Conquest.

As the kingdom became more internally peaceful and wealth accumulated among the landed nobility, substantial country houses — Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire is a classic example — were built for private families. In the 17th century, Inigo Jones drew on the principles of classical (Greek and Roman) architecture to design elegant buildings for the crown, including the Queen's House at Greenwich and the Banqueting House on Whitehall in London. Later in the same century, Sir Christopher Wren adapted the ornate European architectural styles then in vogue into a distinctively British idiom, most famously in his design for the post-Fire replacement of St Paul's Cathedral.

The 18th century then moved towards cleaner, simpler designs. The Scottish architect Robert Adam was one of the period's most influential figures — he worked not only in the UK but also across Europe and into North America, and he typically designed the interior decoration of a building alongside the exterior. His private commissions included Dumfries House in Scotland, and his wider influence shaped urban developments such as the famous Royal Crescent at Bath.

The Cenotaph war memorial on Whitehall, London, site of the annual Remembrance Day service · Harry Mitchell, 2015. CC-BY-4.0. Wikimedia Commons.

The 19th century saw a deliberate revival of the medieval Gothic style in British public architecture. As British cities expanded under industrialisation, grand public buildings were put up in Gothic idiom: the Houses of Parliament in Westminster and St Pancras Station in London are the best-known examples, and similarly grand town halls in cities such as Manchester and Sheffield followed the same architectural logic.

In the early 20th century Sir Edwin Lutyens took a British architectural practice across the Empire. Among his most prominent projects was the master plan for New Delhi as the seat of British government in India. After the First World War, Lutyens designed many war memorials around the world, including the Cenotaph on Whitehall in central London. The Cenotaph is the site of the annual Remembrance Day service attended by the monarch, by senior politicians, and by ambassadors from other countries.

The late-20th and 21st-century British architectural scene has produced several internationally significant names. Sir Norman Foster, Lord (Richard) Rogers and Dame Zaha Hadid have worked on headline projects both within the UK and around the world.

Running alongside architecture proper is the British tradition of formal garden and landscape design. In the 18th century, Lancelot 'Capability' Brown laid out the parklands around many country houses so that the estates looked as though the landscaping were natural — gently contoured grass, carefully placed groves of trees, and artificial lakes. Later in the tradition, Gertrude Jekyll often collaborated with Edwin Lutyens on colourful planted gardens around the houses he built. The annual Chelsea Flower Show is the contemporary showpiece for British and international garden design.

Britain has produced a long sequence of influential designers across furniture, ceramics, interiors and clothing. The furniture designer Thomas Chippendale worked in the 18th century; the ceramicist Clarice Cliff produced distinctive Art Deco pieces in the early 20th century; and Sir Terence Conran was one of the century's most influential interior designers. On the clothing side, leading British fashion designers of recent decades include Mary Quant, Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood.

British writers have been unusually successful at international literary prizes: several British authors have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, including the novelist Sir William Golding, the poet Seamus Heaney, and the playwright Harold Pinter. In the popular fiction category, the UK is responsible for two of the 20th century's most widely read franchises — Agatha Christie's detective novels, read across the world, and the James Bond series introduced in the novels of Ian Fleming. In a public poll run in 2003, the country's best-loved novel was voted to be JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction, first awarded in 1968, is handed out each year to what a panel of judges considers the year's best novel by an author from the Commonwealth, Ireland or Zimbabwe. Winners in recent decades have included Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel and Julian Barnes.

The British literary canon itself stretches back more than two centuries. Jane Austen's novels of the early 19th century — Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility among them — explore marriage, family and social station. A generation later, Charles Dickens was writing some of the most enduring narratives of Victorian England, including Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, and creating characters (Scrooge, Mr Micawber) who have passed into the wider culture. Thomas Hardy's novels of late-Victorian rural life include Far from the Madding Crowd and Jude the Obscure. The Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson produced adventure fiction (Treasure Island, Kidnapped) and the novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, another Scot — and by training a doctor — created Sherlock Holmes, among the first great fictional detectives. In the 20th century Evelyn Waugh wrote sharply satirical novels (Decline and Fall, Scoop) and the more earnest Brideshead Revisited; Graham Greene produced a string of novels shaped by his religious convictions, including The Heart of the Matter, Brighton Rock, The Honorary Consul and Our Man in Havana; and Sir Kingsley Amis, author of more than twenty novels, is best remembered for his comic debut Lucky Jim. Among living British authors, J K Rowling's Harry Potter series has achieved unusual global reach.

British poetry is one of the richest national poetic traditions in the world. Beowulf, an Anglo-Saxon poem that tells of its hero's battles against monsters, is still read and still translated into modern English. The Middle Ages bequeathed Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, set at the court of King Arthur.

Shakespeare, better known as a playwright, also wrote a large body of sonnets (14-line poems) and a handful of longer poems. A generation or two later, John Milton produced the blank-verse epic Paradise Lost. A later poetic strand found its subject in nature, most notably William Wordsworth. Sir Walter Scott wrote poems drawn from Scottish and Anglo-Scottish border traditions and, in his prose work, novels set in Scotland.

Poetry was a widely read form through the 19th century, with William Blake, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and both Robert and Elizabeth Browning all writing major work. In the 20th century, a distinct 'war poetry' tradition emerged from the trenches of the First World War — Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are its leading figures — and later British popular poets have included Sir Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, Sir John Betjeman and Ted Hughes. Many of the best-known poets are buried or commemorated in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey.

Famous opening lines to remember include: 'Oh to be in England now that April's there...' (Robert Browning, 1812–89, Home Thoughts from Abroad); 'She walks in beauty, like the night...' (Lord Byron, 1788–1824, She Walks in Beauty); 'I wander'd lonely as a cloud...' (William Wordsworth, 1770–1850, The Daffodils); 'Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright...' (William Blake, 1757–1827, The Tyger); 'What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?...' (Wilfred Owen, 1893–1918, Anthem for Doomed Youth).

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