Geography and Landscape

Britain's second city: an industrial powerhouse rebuilt after the war, home of the Balti and the canal network, and the butt of…

The difference between England, Great Britain, the United Kingdom and the British Isles — four terms that mean four different things and…

The county at the far south-western tip of England: a peninsula of beaches, fishing villages, tin mines and a Celtic identity that…

England's traditional territorial divisions — 39 historic counties, overlaid by a confusing and much-changed set of modern administrative ones.

Field walls built from stone without mortar, held together by gravity and friction alone — and the defining feature of the northern…

The capital of Scotland: a city built on volcanic rock, split between a medieval Old Town and a Georgian New Town, and…

The largest and most populous nation of the United Kingdom: 57 million people, no parliament of its own, and a strong north-south…

The capital of England and the United Kingdom: a city of nine million people, two thousand years of history, and thirty-two boroughs…

Britain's modest but serious mountains — none above 1,350m, all of them capable of killing the unprepared, and the birthplace of recreational…

The six counties in the north-east of the island of Ireland that remain part of the United Kingdom, with a divided history…

Britain's national mapping agency, founded to map Scotland after the Jacobite rising, and producer of the walking maps used by everyone who…

The two island groups off the north coast of Scotland — Norse rather than Gaelic in heritage, and Scottish only since 1469.

The nine statistical regions England is divided into for government and data — and the informal ones, like the North and the…

The northernmost nation of the United Kingdom, with its own parliament, legal system, banknotes and a strongly held identity distinct from England.

Britain's rural landscape of fields, hedgerows, footpaths and villages — almost entirely farmed, criss-crossed with public rights of way, and fiercely protected.

A self-governing island in the Irish Sea that is not part of the United Kingdom, has the world's oldest continuous parliament, and…

A mountainous national park in Cumbria containing England's highest peaks and deepest lakes, and the landscape that produced English Romantic poetry.

A network of lakes and rivers in Norfolk and Suffolk — Britain's largest protected wetland, and entirely man-made by medieval peat digging.

Britain's first national park: an upland of gritstone edges and limestone dales between Manchester and Sheffield, and the birthplace of the right…

The 215-mile river running through London to the North Sea: England's defining waterway, its historic highway, and once its open sewer.

A national park of limestone valleys, dry stone walls, field barns and waterfalls in the Pennines of northern England.

The nation on the western side of Great Britain: mountainous, historically industrial, and home to the oldest living language in Britain.

England's largest historic county: three ridings, a fierce local identity, and a population convinced it constitutes a country in its own right.