Culture and Media

Britain's outsized contribution to popular music — from the Beatles and the Stones to punk, rave and grime — and a live…

Britain's radio landscape: BBC stations organised by genre rather than region, a strong commercial sector, and listening figures that have barely fallen…

A broadcasting culture built on short, writer-led series, public service obligations and a national habit of watching the same programmes at the…

The world's longest-running science fiction television series: a time-travelling alien in a police box, on the BBC since 1963, played by fifteen…

The BBC's flagship soap opera, set in a fictional East London square since 1985, and famous for its grim storylines and the…

Britain's largest music festival, held on a Somerset dairy farm most summers: 200,000 people, five days, and a near-certainty of mud.

Britain's main commercial broadcaster, launched in 1955 to end the BBC monopoly, and the home of Coronation Street, the biggest entertainment formats…

Britain's national press: a dozen papers sold across the whole country, openly partisan, fiercely competitive, and unlike the American local-newspaper model in…

Europe's largest street festival: a Caribbean carnival held in west London every August bank holiday weekend, with steel bands, sound systems and…

A riotous Christmas stage show for families, based on a fairy tale, in which a man plays the dame, a woman plays…

The British Broadcasting Corporation: a publicly funded, editorially independent broadcaster paid for by a licence fee on every household that watches live…

An eight-week summer season of classical concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, with cheap standing tickets and a famously raucous Last Night.

London's theatre district around Shaftesbury Avenue and Covent Garden — around forty commercial theatres, and the equal of Broadway in scale and…