Introduction to Great Britain

Abstract

Welcome to Britain. Let us begin with a story. Some friends from Canada on their first visit to Britain arrived exhausted at their destination. The long flight from Toronto had been fine: experienced travellers, they had even slept through large parts of it. What tired them out was not the flight, but the 2 h drive from the airport of arrival. In Canada, they were used to long rides through a landscape that changed little from one region to another, and which had little traffic; but in southern Britain over a short space they encountered urban space, open countryside, more urban space, forest, villages, more open countryside and more urban space, all repeated in quick succession. Their exhaustion was not helped by the overcrowded roads. It was as if they had travelled the equivalent of hundreds of miles while in fact travelling only a few. This is not an unusual effect upon new visitors to Britain. For a small island – a mere 800 miles (1,280 km) north to south and 400 (640 km) from east to west at maximum stretch – containing some 60 million people and so relatively crowded, it offers a wide diversity of landscape types and much more (apparently) uninhabited space than might be expected.