Peoples & Culture
Britain's greatest artistic contributions have come in the fields of theatre, literature and architecture. Although there is not an equivalent tradition in painting and sculpture, England is a treasure house of masterpieces from every age and continent thanks to its rapacious past. Most visitors are overwhelmed by the stately homes of the aristocracy, and England's fine collection of castles and cathedrals. After many invasions in their ancient history, the people of Great Britain can claim a diverse lineage of European peoples, including Celts, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, French, and Danes. Considerable intermarriage over the centuries has meant that most of these differences have been lost.

According to census estimates from 1994, about 82 percent of the country's population are English, 10 percent Scottish, 2 percent Welsh, and 4 percent Irish; 2 percent are people of other races, primarily West Indian, Pakistani, Indian, Chinese, and other European. Whoever has studied English literature at school will remember ploughing through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens and Morrissey, and painful though it might have been at the time, no-one can deny England's formidable contribution to the Western literary canon.

Perhaps Britain's greatest cultural export has been the English language, the current lingua franca of the international community. There are astonishing regional variations in accents, and it is not unusual to find those in southern England claiming to need an interpreter to speak to anyone living north of Oxford. The majority of English who profess religious beliefs belong to the Church of England, which became independent of Rome in the 16th century. Other significant protestant churches include Methodist, Baptist and the Salvation Army. One in 10 Britons consider themselves Catholic, and there are now over a million Muslims and sizeable Hindu and Sikh populations.