England Culture

Asking my way around England, I've made myself the source of endless semi-innocent amusement. Chiswick? Might you mean Chizzick, laddie? Leominster? Oh, you mean Lemster, ha ha ha ha! It turns out the Brits have booby-trapped their whole island with misspelled place names. Phonics won't do you any good--there's no pattern at all. Aln is pronounced like Al plus an "n," but Alne is Awn and Alnmouth is Ailmouth. Meanwhile, Altrincham is pronounced Altringam but Bellingham is Bellinjam.

The accountant warned that piers aren't profitable. Builders said the cost of sinking piles 30 feet beneath the North Sea was prohibitive. Residents thought construction on the weather-beaten coast was a pipe dream. Chris Iredale ignored them all. Fourteen years after buying a wood-planked stub at the water's edge, last month he opened the 620-foot Southwold Pier, the first such structure built on a British shore in 50 years and the latest example of the country's seaside revival.

Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, three times the bridesmaid and finally the bride, Tuesday won Britain's coveted Booker Prize on the fourth try with her sweeping 1930s saga, "The Blind Assassin." "It is a very great honor and deeply gratifying," said Atwood, now virtually assured a place on bestseller lists around the world.

The East End's Eliza Doolittles have long since moved away--not to rural Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, mind you, but to suburban Essex and Kent, where their cockney rhyming slang is hardly heard. The street markets they abandoned in the gritty neighborhoods of Spitalfields and Whitechapel are Bangladeshi now. And the cockneys' favorite pie-and-mash shops are outnumbered by tandoori restaurants and trendy cafes that serve arugula salad to City of London slickers.

Here in the urban rain forest that is Britain's capital city, the once-hallowed umbrella is in danger of becoming little more than a means of staying dry. Although still a symbol of prim and proper Britishness, the umbrella's importance as a required accessory for the fashionable gentleman or lady is diminishing. These days it's thought of mostly as a tool, a piece of equipment that gets the job done.

"We have all become terribly sophisticated in the way we look at country houses," says Tim Knox, architectural historian of the National Trust in Britain. "Yet in the past it would have been unthinkable to question the authenticity of the venerable clutter and old furnishings in some of these great historic houses." What was that venerable clutter anyway? Often, it was current arrangements meant to recall those former days.

The Warner Bros. summer-hit kids' movie, "Free Willy," about a boy who helps return a captive whale to its natural habitat, is to open in Britain in February--but English audiences are already reacting. The trailer for the film, which grossed nearly $77 million in the United States, is already playing at several theaters around England. But instead of the misty-eyed heartstring reaction the film received in the States, the trailer is being greeted with giggles and guffaws.

It is easier, a grieving Britain has learned these last extraordinary few days, to bury a queen than a maverick princess. A queen may go in solemn splendor to her rest when the state observes the rigorous precedent, protocol and seamless ceremony for which Britain is famous. But if the late princess is Diana of Wales, ritual itself must be reinvented.

It's been 28 years since the last of the town's four coal mines closed, yet powerful memories linger of a life where young boys joined their fathers "down the pits" and the community shared its hardships as one. "There was a love-hate relationship with the mines," recalled Ted Griffiths, a burly miner's son, as he sipped his beer at the Tylorstown Workingman's Club. "Men didn't want their kids going down, but the camaraderie was so strong, they wouldn't give it up themselves."

Within the boxy and ubiquitous London taxi cab, humorist Alan Brien once noted in Punch, a person may perform all human activities not requiring main drainage. Within the dark restrictions of public transportation in Los Angeles, now reasons businesswoman Francesca Gallo, there should be ample demand for the centuries-proven versatility, personality, romance and utility absolute of the British hack. So she has launched London Taxi Ltd.

In the grittier corners of east and south London, British hip-hop heads bounce to the same beat that pounds in American clubs. But instead of sending shout-outs to Long Beach or Brooklyn, these days the MCs here send them to Lewisham and Brixton. After 15 years of mimicking the American accents and gangsta bravado of U.S.-born rap, British hip-hoppers are making the art form their own. They're rapping in their own accents, talking about their own streets, telling of life in their own country.

In the best of times, the Chelsea Flower Show is a rite of spring heralding the end of winter and the birth of a summer of garden parties for the well-heeled and gardening for the, well, everyone else. After this worst of winters, however, the floral extravaganza was more than a marker in the British cycle of life. It was salvation to the sensory-deprived.

Ho, ho, ho, Henry Higgins, the queen's English ain't wot it used to be. At least, that's what three Australian researchers have discovered after listening to tapes of decades of Queen Elizabeth II's annual Christmas broadcasts. Her majesty's vowels are gradually slipping under the influence of younger and--dare say--lower-class Britons.

To Britons already feeling besieged by the Yank spellcheck on their computers, government guidelines to Americanize the spelling of some scientific words in schools are making them see the colour red. After all, sulfur and fetus aren't part of the queen's English they learnt. "As if Microsoft, the Internet, Disney, rap, McDonald's and chads were not enough to contend with, we now find an American fifth column in our own midst," huffed the Independent newspaper in an editorial last week.

Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, three times the bridesmaid and finally the bride, Tuesday won Britain's coveted Booker Prize on the fourth try with her sweeping 1930s saga, "The Blind Assassin." "It is a very great honor and deeply gratifying," said Atwood, now virtually assured a place on bestseller lists around the world.

British students are proud of the gap in their education--the gap year, that is. Concerned that the classroom has left them book smart but street unwise, growing numbers of high school graduates here are opting to take a year off from their formal studies to learn to make their way in the world. Or around the world.

In the grittier corners of east and south London, British hip-hop heads bounce to the same beat that pounds in American clubs. But instead of sending shout-outs to Long Beach or Brooklyn, these days the MCs here send them to Lewisham and Brixton. After 15 years of mimicking the American accents and gangsta bravado of U.S.-born rap, British hip-hoppers are making the art form their own. They're rapping in their own accents, talking about their own streets, telling of life in their own country.

In a showdown between town and country, the British Parliament on Friday demanded the death sentence for "Tallyho." Hunting with hounds should be criminalized, the House of Commons voted, 411-151, after debate fraught with passion and history. The spectacle of red-coated riders and packs of hounds coursing through the winter countryside is likely to survive another year or two, but the vote means that it may not outlast the millennium.

In retrospect, the junky army-green jalopy and silver Mercedes limousine parked in tandem outside Home House offered the first clue that there is something different about this exclusive club. Inside the 18th century townhouse, the book-lined bar has the requisite sculptured busts and stuffed deer. All well and good. But what's this beyond the high-back leather chairs and needlepoint pillows? In one corner of the bar area, a young man in his shirt sleeves has opened a laptop on the coffee table.

For 40 years, British designer Terence Conran led the charge toward a single-minded populist idea: Make good taste available to Everyman. He sold simple, clean-lined furnishings in postwar Britain, then crossed over to conquer the Continent. Eventually he plied his wares in trendy design stores along America's East Coast. Now, just as the democratic design bandwagon has begun to roll into every Kmart and Target, the champion of cheap chic has abandoned the cause. Sir Terence is going up-market.