England occupies the southern and eastern two-thirds of the island of Great Britain. It has about 57 million people — roughly 84% of the UK population — in an area smaller than Alabama, which makes it one of the most densely populated countries in Europe.
The constitutional oddity
England is the only nation of the UK with no devolved parliament. Scotland has Holyrood, Wales the Senedd and Northern Ireland the Assembly; England is governed directly by the UK Parliament at Westminster.
This produces the West Lothian question: Scottish MPs at Westminster can vote on health or education policy that applies only in England, while English MPs have no say on the same matters in Scotland. Various fixes have been tried and abandoned, and the situation persists largely because any English parliament would immediately dominate the UK one, given the population imbalance.
The landscape
Broadly, England tilts. The north and west are higher and older — the Pennines running down the spine, the Lake District, the Peak District, Dartmoor and Exmoor. The south and east are lower, flatter and drier, with chalk downland, fenland and the clay of the Midlands.
Nowhere in England is more than about 70 miles from the sea, and the highest point, Scafell Pike, is 978 metres — modest by international standards but genuinely serious hill country in bad weather.
North and south
The most discussed division in English life. The North-South divide is economic before it is anything else: London and the South East generate far more output per head, house prices are dramatically higher, and life expectancy is measurably longer.
It is also cultural, and the English enjoy it enormously. Northerners characterise the South as expensive, unfriendly and soft; Southerners characterise the North as bleak and blunt. Both stereotypes are affectionately maintained and largely nonsense, though the bath vowel and the meal-name split are entirely real linguistic markers of it.
The cities
After London: Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Sheffield, Bristol and Nottingham. Nearly all of them are industrial creations that grew explosively in the nineteenth century, and nearly all spent the late twentieth century recovering from the loss of the industries that made them.
Several have done so with real success — Manchester in particular has transformed since the 1996 IRA bombing forced a rebuilding of its centre.
The identity
English national identity is a newer and more awkward thing than Scottish or Welsh identity, because the English spent centuries using “English” and “British” interchangeably without needing to distinguish them. Devolution changed that, and English identity — and the St George’s Cross, once largely confined to football — has become considerably more visible since 1999.
England also has no anthem of its own, using the UK one, which is a standing minor grievance discussed under the national anthem.