RickMav....NICELY PUT!!! Can I ditto that?

To Ani - ditto away.

I'll have to add my vote to the history of England.

The Sally Lunn Bunn in Bath is another fav.

EastEnders - the best soap opera of all time now cancelled by those dastardly folks at BBC America!

And of course, the history, the pubs, the countryside, the people, watching the saga of the royal family, staying at snooty Claridges - it's all good!

It's so........English.

Thank you everyone for your thoughts here. This is exactly what I was looking for. It has really amped me up for my trip in May!! At first I considered 4 days in London, now I am thinking a week!! Even this will not be long enough, but I'm sure leave me longing to come back again soon.

I can't wait to see the pubs! I am in Portland, Oregon and beer is a really big deal here!

London ... and those British colloquialisms.

What's not to love about England?!

My favorites are:
the history of the place -- the fact that everything is so old and treasured.
the fact that England is such a nation of readers -- I love to browse in English book stores
That the people may be reserved on the outside, but are just about the most considerate people ever on the inside.
Annette

Rickmav - thankyou for a great piece of writing.

For me - a Brit expat - the UK is encapsulated in what I miss about it most. And that's not the castles and such - it's the BBC.

Alice, if you really mean what you say about the BBC, I suggest that you e-mail Tony Blair ASAP. Sorry to introduce politics, but the present government seems to be determined to destroy the BBC or a least to intimidate it. To be politically even-handed I'll say that the Tories also hated the Beeb when they were in office probably because they too were held to account for their policies.

London's cheap airfares so I can get away from this horrrible congested island as often as possible!

The gardens, the weather (HONEST), the loooooong summer days, Pimms on the lawn w/ salmon sandwiches and scones/clotted cream, the history, THEATRE, sitting by a roaring fire in a country pub having a civilised political discussion (as opposed to un-civilized as it often is at home), Scrumpy, Newcastle Brown, punting on the Cherwell or Cam (and Oxford and Cambridge for that matter), Roundabouts!, and a thousand other things . . . . .

History everywhere. Preservation of the small villages and towns. Fantastic stone houses with beautiful gardens. Theater. Pubs. The English sense of humour. The British accents in all their varieties. Walking paths through so much of the country. Beautiful countryside. London with all of its history, museums, and huge variety of terrific restaurants in all price ranges. And most of all, my sweetie.

I'm partial as I have friends there. I like the idea of their "locals"
In my friends' crowd, they are very laid back, could care how you look or dress as long as you were nice and fun, where the otherside of the coin, I once had a love who owned a place on Saville Row.He was the opposite;
We broke up because he hated the French.

I get the sense that most of you lot would have us preserve this nation in aspic.
The danger would be that it'd end up some theme-park chocolate-box-y merrie olde Englande, with long summer evenings, the dull thwack of leather upon willow, warm beer and old maids cycling to evensong, thatched cottages and caps doffed to village squires. (To borrow liberally from the unlamented John Major).

I don't believe it's our history or our theatre, pubs or village greens that define England.

For me the things that are most redolent of England are either landscapes (particularly the chalk downlands that I grew up on)or the vibrancy of some of our cities... for me it's either the uber-urban or the supra-natural, never, I'm afraid the cutesy rural idyll of Agatha Christie & The Daily Mail. Give me the earthen sod of Ted Hughes or the zeitgeist of Zephaniah anyday!

Dr D.

Our first trip to England was in 1969 and we still talk about a phenomenon we saw then and have experienced again and again since.

We call it "the two of clubs syndrome."

No matter where and no matter with whom, simply start a conversation using the "two of clubs" gambit, the lowest common denominators of person-to-person talk. The weather, the headlines, the traffic, just anything banal.

And your British conversation-mate will be off and babbling. For minutes, for hours. Just talk, talk, talk. It takes them 50 words to say what we Yanks say in a couple or just with a grunt.

We found this "two of clubs" habit to be particularly effective with older people out in the country. They were so lonely, so longing for human conversation, argument, or companionship that we struck up talks that would go on and on. Some of those people of 1969 and later trips are friends to this day! "You Yanks have such a funny way of talking," they would say. And they say so to this very day!

The memories

The "two of clubs" story reminded me so much of one of Bill Bryson's observations on the quirks and foibles of England and the English. Anyone with a fondness for this subject should read (if they haven't already) his "Notes from a Small Island". It is certainly one of the funniest travel books I have ever read.

"The finest sight and Englishman ever sees is the High Road that leads to Scotland"

That's what Johnston said, isn't it?:)

Dr. Samuel Johnson, in his dictionary of the English language, defined oatmeal as follows: a grain eaten by horses in England and by men in Scotland.

He had it all wrong, now didn't he?

But you prove a point; there is a long-lived antipathy between the two cultures and it makes for some very, very funny conversations.