Great Britain was inhabited, settled and emptied many times to the rhythm of the ice ages. The footprints at Happisburgh, in Norfolk, prove that hominins walked here almost a million years ago, when the island was still a peninsula of the continent. Only around 6000 BC, as the ice melted and the sea rose, did the English Channel finally separate Great Britain from continental Europe. The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers gave way, around 4000 BC, to the first Neolithic farmers, who cleared the woodland, raised livestock and began to build colossal monuments of earth and stone.
The most famous of them all is Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain. It was not built in one go: its phases run from around 3000 BC — when the circular ditch was dug — to the raising of the great sandstone trilithons (sarsens) and the enigmatic blue blocks (bluestones) brought, it is believed, from the Preseli hills in Wales, more than 200 kilometres away. It is a feat of engineering, astronomy and social organisation by a society without metals or writing, aligned with the summer and winter solstices. Nearby are Avebury, the largest stone circle in Europe, and Silbury Hill, the biggest prehistoric artificial mound on the continent; the whole complex is a Unesco World Heritage Site.
The mystery of what Stonehenge was for is still open: solar temple, calendar, elite cemetery, place of healing or gathering point for scattered peoples. Recent excavations show that crowds coming from far away gathered around it for great feasts, above all in midwinter. With the arrival of metalworking — bronze around 2200 BC and iron around 800 BC — the landscape filled with barrows, hillforts and a warlike, hierarchical society that already foreshadowed the Celtic world the Romans would find on their arrival.
When Julius Caesar first landed in 55 BC, the island was inhabited by peoples speaking Celtic languages — Britons in the south, ancestors of the Welsh and the Cornish — organised into tribes such as the Catuvellauni, the Iceni or the Brigantes, ruled by petty kings and druids. Caesar barely managed a couple of raids. The real conquest came in AD 43, when the emperor Claudius ordered the invasion and Rome annexed much of the island, creating the province of Britannia.
Resistance was fierce. In AD 60 or 61, Boudica, queen of the Iceni, led a great rebellion that destroyed Camulodunum (Colchester), Londinium (London) and Verulamium (St Albans) before being crushed. With the south subdued, Rome never fully mastered the mountainous north, home to the peoples it called Caledonians. To fix the frontier, the emperor Hadrian ordered the building of Hadrian's Wall around AD 122, eighty Roman miles of stone from coast to coast, with forts, towers and garrisons: the northwestern limit of the Roman Empire, today a World Heritage Site. Further north, the short-lived Antonine Wall marked an even more advanced frontier for a few decades before being abandoned.
Almost four centuries of Roman rule left cities, roads, villas, baths — such as those at Bath, Roman Aquae Sulis — and, in time, Christianity. But by the early fifth century the Empire was crumbling: around 410, the emperor Honorius told the British cities that they had to see to their own defence, and the legions withdrew for good. Roman Britain, Christian and Latinised, was left at the mercy of raids by Picts, Scots and, above all, the Germanic peoples crossing the North Sea. A new and turbulent era was opening.
After the Roman withdrawal, between the fifth and sixth centuries, Germanic peoples reached the eastern coasts of Britain — Angles, Saxons and Jutes, according to the tradition recorded by the monk Bede — who settled and gradually pushed the Celtic Britons west, towards what are now Wales and Cornwall. Out of the mix of invaders came a constellation of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that traditional historiography called the Heptarchy: Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, East Anglia, Essex, Kent and Sussex. From those Angles comes the name of England ("land of the Angles") and of English. In the year 597, the mission of St Augustine, sent by Pope Gregory the Great, landed in Kent and began the conversion to Christianity, which merged with the already existing Celtic Christian tradition of Ireland and the north.
The balance was broken by the Vikings. From the sacking of the monastery of Lindisfarne in 793, waves of Scandinavians first raided and then colonised much of the island. By the end of the ninth century, the Danish "Great Heathen Army" had destroyed almost every English kingdom; only Wessex held out, under Alfred the Great, who defeated the Danes at Edington (878) and agreed a border that left the northeast and east under Danish law: the Danelaw. York (Jorvik) became a major Viking centre.
Alfred's successors — his son Edward and his grandson Athelstan, victor at Brunanburh in 937 — gradually reconquered the Danelaw and unified an English kingdom for the first time. But the Norse attacks did not stop: at the beginning of the eleventh century the Danish king Cnut came to rule over England, Denmark and Norway in a North Sea empire. On his death, the English crown returned to the old house of Wessex with Edward the Confessor. When he died childless in January 1066, a succession crisis opened that would change the island's history for ever.
The year 1066 is the most famous date in English history. On the death of Edward the Confessor, the assembly of nobles chose Harold Godwinson, the most powerful man in England, as king. But his throne was claimed by two rivals: Harald Hardrada, king of Norway, and William, Duke of Normandy, who said he had been promised the crown. Harold had to face both almost at once. First he defeated and killed Hardrada at Stamford Bridge, in Yorkshire, on 25 September. Only days later, William landed in the south.
The two armies clashed on 14 October 1066 at the Battle of Hastings. After a gruelling day, Harold fell — according to tradition, with an arrow in the eye, as the famous Bayeux Tapestry shows — and his army collapsed. William, from then on "the Conqueror", was crowned king in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. English resistance went on for a few years, and was harshly put down, especially during the brutal Harrying of the North of 1069-1070, which devastated Yorkshire.
The consequences of 1066 were deep and permanent. A new Norman aristocracy, French-speaking, almost entirely replaced the Anglo-Saxon one; feudalism was firmly imposed; stone castles such as the Tower of London and Romanesque cathedrals went up all over the country. In 1086 William ordered the Domesday Book, a meticulous inventory of land and wealth with no equal in the Europe of its time. Out of the clash between the Norman French of the court and the Old English of the people came, over the centuries, modern English, a language of Germanic root loaded with Latin and French vocabulary. England was also tied for centuries to the affairs of France.
The English Middle Ages were the slow building of institutions with an enormous future ahead of them. In 1215, the rebel barons forced King John to seal Magna Carta at Runnymede, a document that set limits on royal power, protected certain rights and established that not even the monarch was above the law. Although it began as a pact between the king and the nobility, over the centuries it became a universal symbol of liberties in the face of power. Those decades also saw the birth of Parliament: in 1265, Simon de Montfort summoned an assembly that, for the first time, included representatives of the towns.
In 1337 the Hundred Years' War broke out with France, an intermittent series of conflicts that ran until 1453 over the French throne and over territories on the continent. England won resounding victories — Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), Agincourt (1415), with the Welsh longbow as the decisive weapon — but ended up losing almost all its French possessions. In the middle of the war, in 1348-1349, the Black Death arrived, killing perhaps a third of the population or more. The demographic collapse upended the feudal economy, made labour more expensive and fed tensions that erupted in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.
Barely had the war with France ended when England bled itself dry in a dynastic civil war: the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487), between the houses of Lancaster (red rose) and York (white rose), both branches of the Plantagenets. It was a succession of battles, betrayals and deposed kings — Towton (1461), the bloodiest ever fought on English soil, among them — that culminated in 1485 at Bosworth, where Richard III died and Henry Tudor took the crown as Henry VII. By marrying Elizabeth of York he united the two roses and founded the Tudor dynasty, which would open the English early modern age.
The reign of Henry VIII (1509-1547) marked a decisive break. Eager to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Boleyn, and refused by the pope, Henry broke with Rome. Between 1533 and 1534, a series of Acts of Parliament — culminating in the Act of Supremacy of 1534 — proclaimed him supreme head of the Church of England, separate from the papacy. The English Reformation was born. Henry dissolved the monasteries and confiscated their enormous wealth, transformed the country's social map and executed those who opposed him, among them Thomas More. He had six wives — two of them, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, beheaded — in his obsessive search for a male heir.
The Reformation opened decades of religious swings. His son Edward VI deepened Protestantism; his daughter Mary I ("Bloody Mary") tried to restore Catholicism and had some three hundred Protestants burned at the stake. Stability came with the last of the Tudors, Elizabeth I (1558-1603), who established a moderate Protestant religious settlement and presided over an age of splendour. Under her reign the theatre of William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe flourished, English naval power took hold and sailor-privateers such as Francis Drake roamed the seas.
The most dramatic moment was the confrontation with the Spain of Philip II. In 1587, Elizabeth ordered the execution of her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, a Catholic and the focus of plots. The following year, in 1588, the Spanish Armada was scattered by the English navy and by storms, an episode England celebrated as a sign of its Protestant, maritime destiny. Elizabeth, the "Virgin Queen", died without issue in 1603, and with her the Tudor dynasty came to an end. The crown then passed to her Scottish relative James VI of Scotland, who reigned in England as James I, uniting both crowns in one person for the first time.
The union of the crowns under the Stuarts brought no calm. The clash between kings convinced they ruled by divine right and a Parliament increasingly jealous of its prerogatives — made worse by religious tensions between Anglicans, Puritans and Catholics — led to the English Civil War (1642-1651). King Charles I and his supporters (the Royalists, or Cavaliers) faced the forces of Parliament (the Roundheads), among whom a military genius emerged: Oliver Cromwell, at the head of his disciplined New Model Army.
With the king defeated, something unprecedented in Europe happened: Charles I was tried by his own Parliament, convicted of treason and beheaded outside the Palace of Whitehall on 30 January 1649. The monarchy was abolished and a republic proclaimed, the Commonwealth, which soon turned into Cromwell's personal Protectorate, with him governing almost with the powers of a king. His regime imposed an austere Puritan morality and carried out brutal repression in Ireland, with the massacres of Drogheda and Wexford (1649), which left a deep wound in Irish memory.
With Cromwell dead in 1658, the republican experiment collapsed. In 1660, Parliament restored the monarchy by calling Charles II, son of the executed king, to the throne: this is the Restoration, a time of reopened theatres and a certain loosening after Puritan strictness, also marked by the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London of 1666. The underlying conflict, however, had not been resolved. In 1688, fear of a Catholic king, James II, brought on the Glorious Revolution: Parliament offered the crown to William of Orange and his wife Mary, and in 1689 passed the Bill of Rights, which enshrined the supremacy of Parliament over the crown. The British parliamentary monarchy was born.
The eighteenth century opened with a founding event for the modern state. England (which had already absorbed Wales in the sixteenth century) and Scotland had shared a monarch since 1603, but they were separate kingdoms with their own parliaments. After years of negotiation — pushed in Scotland by the ruin of the failed Darién colonial venture and by economic pressure — the Acts of Union of 1707 merged both parliaments into a single one at Westminster and created the Kingdom of Great Britain. Scotland kept its own Presbyterian Church, its own legal system and its own education system. The union was unpopular with a good part of the Scottish people and fed the Jacobite risings, which sought to restore the Catholic Stuarts and ended in defeat at Culloden in 1746.
On that political basis, Great Britain became over the course of the eighteenth century the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the deepest economic transformation since the invention of agriculture. In the Midlands and northern England came together coal, iron, capital accumulated through trade (including the slave trade and its products), an earlier agricultural revolution that freed up labour, and a wave of inventions: the steam engine perfected by James Watt, mechanical spinning machines, the loom, blast furnaces. Manchester filled with cotton mills; entire cities grew in a few decades.
The human cost was enormous. Millions of country people crowded into filthy cities without services; men, women and children worked exhausting shifts in factories and mines. The labour movement appeared, along with the first factory acts, the Luddites who smashed machines and, in 1819, the Peterloo massacre in Manchester, when cavalry charged a peaceful demonstration calling for electoral reform, leaving fifteen dead. The Industrial Revolution made the United Kingdom the world's leading economic power, the "workshop of the world", and laid the material foundations of the empire that would spread across every continent.
Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, the United Kingdom built the largest empire in history: at its height, around 1920, it covered a quarter of the planet's land and ruled over hundreds of millions of people, from Canada to India, from Australia to much of Africa. That power brought global trade, railways, a world lingua franca, and also domination, plunder and violence. Telling it honestly means naming both faces.
The darkest face was the transatlantic slave trade. For more than two centuries, British ships carried more than three million enslaved Africans to the plantations of America and the Caribbean, in appalling conditions; by the middle of the eighteenth century, Great Britain was the largest slave-trading nation in the world. A long abolitionist movement, with figures such as William Wilberforce and with the decisive voice of freed Africans themselves, got Parliament to abolish the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself across the empire with the Abolition Act of 1833 — which, it is worth remembering, compensated with public money not the enslaved but their owners. In India, after the rule of the East India Company and the great rebellion of 1857, the crown governed the Raj directly: there was modernisation, but also devastating famines and episodes such as the Amritsar massacre of 1919, when troops under General Dyer fired on an unarmed crowd at Jallianwala Bagh and killed, according to the official figure, at least 379 people (Indian estimates put the number much higher).
The list of horrors has other unavoidable stops. The Great Irish Famine of 1845-1852, made worse by London's economic policy, killed around a million people and pushed another million to emigrate, drastically reducing Ireland's population. In China, the Opium Wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) were fought to impose the British opium trade by force and extracted concessions such as Hong Kong. And in the Second Boer War (1899-1902), in South Africa, the British army applied a scorched-earth policy and shut the civilian population into concentration camps where some 26,000 Boer women and children died, along with thousands of black Africans, mostly from disease and hunger. The balance sheet of the empire is the subject of a legitimate and still living historiographical debate; what no serious reading disputes is that its greatness and its wealth were built, to a large extent, on the exploitation and suffering of other peoples.
The long reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) gave its name to an age that was at once one of enormous material progress and of sharp inequality. It was the time of the railway, the telegraph, the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace, the electoral reforms that gradually widened the vote, the formal abolition of slavery and the imperial peak. It was also the time of the working-class districts portrayed by Charles Dickens, of child labour, of cholera and of a deep social gulf. London became the largest city in the world and the financial heart of the planet.
The twentieth century brought two catastrophes. In the First World War (1914-1918), the United Kingdom and its empire mobilised millions of men; close to 900,000 British soldiers died in the trenches of France and Belgium and on other fronts, in battles such as the Somme or Passchendaele that became bywords for industrial slaughter. The war accelerated enormous social changes, among them the right of women to vote, won in 1918 and extended in 1928 after the long struggle of the suffragettes.
Barely a generation later came the Second World War (1939-1945). After the fall of France in 1940, the United Kingdom held out alone against Nazi Germany. Under the leadership of Winston Churchill, the Royal Air Force beat back the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, and the civilian population endured the Blitz: the German bombing that, between 1940 and 1941, killed some 43,000 people and flattened whole districts of London, Coventry, Liverpool and other cities. The image of St Paul's Cathedral standing amid the smoke became a symbol of resistance. The United Kingdom came out victorious in 1945, alongside its allies, but exhausted, in debt and with an empire that was beginning to crack.
The post-war years reshaped the country from top to bottom. In 1945, a Labour government led by Clement Attlee, inspired by the Beveridge Report, built the British welfare state: it nationalised key industries and, above all, created the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948, a public health system free at the point of use and funded by taxes, which became a beloved institution and a symbol of national identity. Social housing went up and public education was expanded.
At the same time, the empire was being dismantled at great speed. In 1947, India and Pakistan gained independence amid a bloody partition; in the following decades dozens of colonies in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean became independent, many of them joining the Commonwealth. The Suez crisis of 1956 showed starkly that the United Kingdom was no longer a superpower able to act on its own against the will of the United States. The arrival of immigrants from the former colonies — symbolised by the ship Empire Windrush, which brought Caribbean migrants in 1948 — transformed society and made it, with both tensions and contributions, multicultural.
In 1973, the United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community. The seventies were years of inflation, strikes and crisis, and out of that discontent came the turn of 1979: the arrival in power of the Conservative Margaret Thatcher, the first woman to head a British government. Thatcher applied a free-market programme — privatisations, curbing union power, financial liberalisation — that transformed the economy and society and still divides opinion. She defeated a bitter miners' strike (1984-1985), retook the Malvinas/Falkland Islands in the 1982 war against Argentina, and left a country more prosperous for some and devastated in its old industrial heartlands for others. Her fall in 1990 did not erase the deep mark of "Thatcherism" on British politics.
The last few decades have reopened the old question of what the United Kingdom is and who makes it up. In 1997-1999, Tony Blair's Labour government drove devolution through: by referendum, Scotland regained its own Parliament (reopened in 1999, after almost three centuries) and Wales got its Assembly (today the Senedd), transferring wide powers to Edinburgh and Cardiff. The structure of the state stopped being purely centralist and became asymmetrically decentralised, with four nations of different status.
The most painful chapter was Northern Ireland. Its roots go far back: to the seventeenth-century Plantation of Ulster, which settled British Protestant colonists, and to the partition of the island in 1921, which left six northern counties — Protestant and unionist in majority — inside the United Kingdom, facing a Catholic south that became independent. From the late sixties, discrimination against the Catholic-nationalist minority and the clash between unionists (in favour of staying in the United Kingdom) and nationalists/republicans (in favour of joining Ireland) degenerated into three decades of violence known as the Troubles. Republican paramilitary groups such as the IRA and loyalist paramilitary groups, along with the British army and police, carried out bombings, shootings and episodes such as Bloody Sunday in Derry (1972). More than 3,500 people died, most of them civilians, in a conflict in which there were responsibilities on all sides. The way out came with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, ratified by referendum, which set up a power-sharing government between the two communities, the principle of consent and progressive disarmament. The peace, imperfect but real, transformed daily life.
The twenty-first century brought new fractures. In 2014, Scotland held an independence referendum: 55% voted to stay in the United Kingdom. Two years later, in the referendum of 23 June 2016, 51.9% of British voters chose to leave the European Union — Brexit — although Scotland and Northern Ireland voted mostly to remain, which revived internal tensions. After years of turbulent negotiation, the United Kingdom left the EU on 31 January 2020. The death of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022, after seventy years on the throne, and the accession of Charles III closed an era. The country enters the third decade of the century debating, once again, the old underlying question: what it means to be the United Kingdom and how long its four nations will stay together.
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On Salisbury Plain, in the county of Wiltshire, stands the most famous prehistoric monument in the world: Stonehenge. Its great stones were raised in several phases between around 3000 and 2000 BC, long before any form of writing existed in the islands. The enormous sandstone blocks (sarsens), weighing up to 25 tonnes, were combined with the so-called bluestones, smaller stones brought, according to archaeological research, from the Preseli hills in Wales, more than 200 kilometres away: an astonishing logistical feat for a Neolithic society.
The monument is carefully aligned with the sun: at the summer solstice, sunrise happens over the Heel Stone, and at the winter one the sunset is framed between the great trilithons. That astronomical orientation suggests a ritual use tied to the cycle of the year, and excavations have revealed burials and large gatherings. It is still debated whether it was a temple, an observatory, an elite cemetery or a place of healing; it was probably several things over its centuries of use.
Stonehenge does not stand alone: it is part of a vast prehistoric sacred landscape that includes Avebury, the largest stone circle in Europe; Silbury Hill, the tallest artificial mound on the continent; and numerous burial barrows. The complex was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1986. At every solstice, thousands of people — among them contemporary druids and pagans — gather beside the stones to watch the sun come up, in a rite that reconnects, in a way, with the crowds who gathered in this same place four thousand years ago.
Bath owes its existence to a phenomenon unique in Great Britain: the country's only natural hot springs. The Britons already worshipped the goddess Sulis here, and the Romans, on arriving, built a great bathing complex and a temple around the spring, dedicating it to Sulis Minerva and naming the place Aquae Sulis. The Roman baths, with their great hot-water pool ringed by columns, are remarkably well preserved and are one of the best-preserved Roman bathing complexes north of the Alps.
After centuries of decline, Bath was spectacularly reborn in the eighteenth century. Turned into the fashionable spa of the Georgian aristocracy, it drew high society, who came to "take the waters", to gamble and to be seen. Driven by figures such as Beau Nash, and with the work of architects such as John Wood the Elder and the Younger, the city was rebuilt in elegant local golden stone with a harmonious neoclassical Palladian layout: the crescent-shaped Royal Crescent and the Circus are its jewels. The novelist Jane Austen, who lived here, set part of her work in this elegant, idle society.
That double heritage — Roman and Georgian — led the whole city of Bath to be declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco. It is also one of the few places on the planet inscribed twice: it is part of the transnational site of the "Great Spa Towns of Europe". Walking through Bath means moving from a Roman temple to an eighteenth-century ballroom, with hot water still rising, as it did two thousand years ago, from the heart of the earth.
The gentle hills of the Cotswolds, between Oxford and Gloucester, hold one of the most idyllic landscapes in England: villages of golden limestone houses, medieval churches, meadows and dry stone walls. But behind that postcard lies a very concrete economic story: that of wool. During the Middle Ages, the Cotswolds bred a sheep with an abundant fleece, the "Cotswold Lion", and its wool became the most prized in Europe, exported to Flanders and Italy for the textile industry.
That wool wealth transformed the region. Enriched wool merchants funded the building of splendid parish churches, disproportionately large and ornate for small villages: these are the famous "wool churches" of Chipping Campden, Northleach or Cirencester, monuments to the power of medieval trade. Towns such as Cirencester had already been important in Roman times — it was the second city of Roman Britain — and wool gave them a second golden age between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.
When the textile industry moved north with the Industrial Revolution and wool lost its primacy, the Cotswolds were left outside the world of factories and chimneys, and kept their villages and their farming landscape intact. That relative economic sidelining is, paradoxically, the reason for their charm today: the Cotswolds are now a protected Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and one of the most visited rural destinations in the country, where the prosperous past of wool is still written on every golden stone house.
Much of central and southern England was the territory of the old kingdom of Wessex, the "kingdom of the West Saxons", which played a decisive part in the making of England. In the ninth century, when the Danish Vikings had destroyed almost every other Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Wessex held out under King Alfred the Great (871-899), the only English monarch to be given the title "the Great". Alfred defeated the Danes at the Battle of Edington (878), reorganised the kingdom's defence with a network of fortified places (burhs), reformed the laws and promoted education and the English language.
The capital of Wessex was Winchester, which for centuries rivalled London as the kingdom's main city and held the remains of the Saxon kings. In its cathedral, one of the largest in Europe, the bones of Anglo-Saxon monarchs are preserved. From Wessex, Alfred's successors — Edward the Elder and Athelstan — reconquered the territory under Danish rule and, around the year 927, united all the English kingdoms under a single crown for the first time: the kingdom of England had been born.
Central and southern England therefore hold some of the founding places of English identity. It is also a literary land: the Victorian writer Thomas Hardy renamed the region "Wessex" in his novels, set in the fields of Dorset and Wiltshire, reviving that ancient name. Among cathedrals, stone villages and rolling fields, this part of England keeps a deeply traditional air and a historical density that reaches back to the prehistory of Stonehenge.
Beyond Wessex, towards the far southwest, the peninsula of Cornwall keeps a Celtic identity distinct from the rest of England. When the Anglo-Saxons pushed the Britons west, Cornwall was one of the strongholds where British culture survived. A language of its own lived on there for centuries, Cornish, related to Welsh and Breton, which came close to dying out but is today the subject of a revival movement. Many inhabitants claim a distinct Cornish identity, with their own flag — the cross of St Piran — and demands for greater recognition.
Cornwall's traditional economy revolved around the sea and mining. Its rugged coasts and countless coves were the land of fishermen, sailors and also smugglers and shipwrecks, feeding a romantic imagination of legends. But it was tin and copper mining that shaped its history: worked since prehistory, the mines of Cornwall had their heyday during the Industrial Revolution, and the mining landscape of Cornwall and west Devon, with its characteristic steam engine houses, is today a Unesco World Heritage Site.
Cornwall is also tied to the most famous of British legends: that of King Arthur. Tintagel Castle, on a sea-battered headland, is traditionally associated with the birth of the legendary monarch. Although the historical figure of Arthur — if he existed — belongs more to myth than to verifiable history, the Arthurian story, born of British resistance to the Saxon invaders, turned this corner of the southwest into one of the most legend-laden landscapes in all the islands.
London began as a Roman foundation. Around AD 47-50, the Romans established Londinium at a ford on the Thames, and it soon became the commercial and administrative centre of the province of Britannia, although Queen Boudica burned it down in her rebellion of 60-61. After the fall of Rome the settlement declined, but the Anglo-Saxons repopulated it and in the Middle Ages, under the Normans, it took hold as the kingdom's main city. William the Conqueror built the Tower of London to dominate it, and a few kilometres away, at Westminster, Edward the Confessor had founded the abbey where kings have been crowned since 1066.
For centuries, London was in fact two neighbouring cities: the City, the centre of trade and finance, walled since Roman times, and Westminster, seat of the monarchy and of Parliament. The city survived the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666, which destroyed much of the City and led to Christopher Wren's rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral. With the Industrial Revolution and the empire, London became the largest city in the world and its financial capital, with the busiest port on the planet.
The twentieth century tested it: the Blitz bombings (1940-1941) killed tens of thousands of Londoners and flattened entire districts, but the city held out. In the post-war years, the arrival of immigrants from the Commonwealth — Caribbean, South Asian, African — turned it into one of the most diverse metropolises in the world. Today London is a global capital of finance, culture and the arts, where the medieval Tower, Victorian Big Ben and the towers of the City and Canary Wharf sit side by side.
Westminster is the institutional heart of the United Kingdom. There stands Westminster Abbey, the Gothic church where kings have been crowned and buried since the Middle Ages and where figures such as Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin lie. Opposite, the Palace of Westminster houses the two chambers of Parliament: the Commons, elected by the people, and the Lords. The current neo-Gothic building was put up after the fire of 1834 and is crowned by the clock tower whose bell, Big Ben, is a worldwide icon.
It was in this precinct that the great struggles between crown and Parliament that shaped British politics were fought: from the medieval origins of the assembly to the Civil War, the execution of Charles I and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which enshrined parliamentary supremacy. One famous episode was the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when Guy Fawkes and other Catholic conspirators tried to blow up Parliament; its failure is still remembered every 5 November with bonfires and fireworks.
A few steps away are Downing Street, the prime minister's residence, and Buckingham Palace, the official London residence of the monarchy since the nineteenth century. This small corner therefore concentrates the country's three symbolic powers — the crown, the government and parliament — and remains the setting for the great ceremonies of state, from coronations to royal funerals, such as that of Elizabeth II in 2022.
On the banks of the Thames, west of London, stands Windsor Castle, the oldest and largest inhabited castle in the world and one of the official residences of the British monarchy. Its origins go back to William the Conqueror, who around 1070 built a wooden fortress here to control the western approach to London. Over the centuries, successive kings turned it into the imposing stone complex of today, with its round tower, its state apartments and St George's Chapel.
Windsor has been the setting for coronations, royal weddings and funerals. In St George's Chapel, home of the Order of the Garter — the country's oldest order of chivalry — many monarchs are buried, among them Henry VIII and, more recently, Elizabeth II, who died in 2022. The bond between the dynasty and this place is so strong that in 1917, in the middle of the First World War, the royal family adopted the name "House of Windsor" to shed its German surnames.
Nearby, the town of Eton is home to the famous Eton College, founded by Henry VI in 1440, the school of a notable share of the British political elite. And a few kilometres away, in the meadow of Runnymede beside the Thames, King John sealed Magna Carta in 1215, one of the founding documents of modern liberties. This whole area therefore breathes the long continuity of the monarchy and of the country's constitutional history.
North of London, two small cities are home to the two oldest universities in the English-speaking world. Oxford, where teaching is documented from the late eleventh century, is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. Cambridge was born around 1209, when a group of scholars left Oxford after a conflict with the town and founded their own school. Ever since, the two — known together as "Oxbridge" — have competed and set the pace of British intellectual life.
Organised in a system of autonomous colleges — precincts with chapel, dining hall and cloisters where students live and study — Oxford and Cambridge trained the country's clergy, lawyers and ruling class for centuries. An astonishing number of decisive figures came out of their lecture rooms: scientists such as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking; writers such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien; and a long list of prime ministers. At Cambridge, in 1953, Watson and Crick worked out the structure of DNA.
Their architecture — Gothic chapels such as that of King's College in Cambridge, historic libraries, centuries-old courtyards — makes both cities heritage jewels. They were not free of conflict with the towns around them (the famous "town and gown" brawls) or of exclusions: women could not take full degrees at Cambridge until well into the twentieth century. Today they are still among the best universities in the world and are also tourist destinations that draw millions of visitors.
Southeast England has always been the way in and out towards the European continent, and therefore the setting for invasions, defences and trade. The Romans came through the coasts of Kent and Sussex in AD 43, St Augustine's missionaries in 597 — who made Canterbury the seat of the English Church — and, in 1066, William the Conqueror, who defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings. Canterbury, with its cathedral, has been the spiritual centre of the Anglican Church for more than fourteen hundred years, and it was there that Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered in 1170, afterwards becoming the goal of the pilgrims immortalised by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales.
Because of its closeness to France, this coast was key in the great wars. The white cliffs of Dover, a national symbol, guard the narrowest crossing to the continent; their castles and fortifications defended the kingdom for centuries, and in the Second World War the area was the front line against a possible German invasion and a base for the Dunkirk evacuation and the Normandy landings. Beneath those same waters runs today the Channel Tunnel, opened in 1994, which links England with France by rail.
The southeast combines that strategic role with a long tradition of seaside resorts and royal residences: Brighton, with its extravagant orientalist Royal Pavilion built for the Prince Regent in the early nineteenth century, became famous as a seaside town. The whole region, prosperous and densely populated, also works as the great belt around London, with which it forms the richest and most dynamic conurbation in the United Kingdom.
No city packs in as many layers of history as York. Founded by the Romans in AD 71 under the name Eboracum, it was one of the main cities of Roman Britain; the emperor Septimius Severus died there and Constantine the Great was proclaimed emperor there in 306. Under the Anglo-Saxons it became an important Christian centre and the capital of the kingdom of Northumbria, one of the most powerful of the Heptarchy.
But its most famous chapter is the Viking one. In 866, the Danish Great Army took the city and renamed it Jórvík. For almost a century, York was the capital of a prosperous, cosmopolitan Viking kingdom, a major trading centre connected with Scandinavia, the islands and the continent. The Coppergate excavations revealed streets, workshops and homes from that period in extraordinary detail, and today the site is recreated for visitors. The last Viking king of York, Eric Bloodaxe, was expelled in 954, when the kingdom was absorbed into a unified England.
In the Middle Ages, York was the second city of the kingdom and the seat of England's second archbishopric. Its cathedral, York Minster, is the largest Gothic church in northern Europe, with spectacular medieval stained glass. The medieval walls, which still ring the old town, and narrow streets such as The Shambles keep the air of the medieval city. York was also the scene of dark episodes, such as the massacre of its Jewish community in 1190, and of the tensions of the Wars of the Roses, which set the houses of York and Lancaster against each other.
Manchester was the city that defined the industrial age. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the combination of a damp climate (ideal for spinning cotton), nearby coal, the canals and the port of Liverpool turned it into the cotton capital of the world, nicknamed "Cottonopolis". Its mills multiplied at a dizzying rate, drawing masses of workers from the countryside and from Ireland who crowded into unhealthy working-class districts. Manchester was the first industrial city in the world, and its transformation amazed and horrified the observers of the day.
Among them was Friedrich Engels, who worked in the city and described the condition of the working class in Manchester in a book that would influence, along with his friendship with Karl Marx, the birth of modern socialism. The city was also the cradle of reform movements. On 16 August 1819, at St Peter's Field, a peaceful crowd of some 60,000 people calling for electoral reform was charged by cavalry: around fifteen people died and there were hundreds of injured. The episode, named with bitter irony the "Peterloo massacre" (in allusion to Waterloo), became a landmark in the struggle for suffrage and freedom of assembly, and has been remembered as a founding moment of British democracy.
Manchester went on being an engine of innovation: in 1830 the world's first intercity railway line opened, between Manchester and Liverpool; and the liberal press was born here with the Manchester Guardian (today The Guardian), founded in 1821 in the wake of Peterloo. In the twentieth century, after the decline of cotton, the city reinvented itself as a cultural, university and musical centre — legendary bands came out of here — and as one of the economic hubs of northern England.
Liverpool grew into one of the great ports of the world, and a considerable part of that fortune was built on the transatlantic slave trade. In the eighteenth century, Liverpool was the leading slaving port in Great Britain — and in the world: its ships ran the "triangular trade", taking manufactured goods to Africa, enslaved Africans to America and the Caribbean, and sugar, cotton and tobacco back to England. It is estimated that Liverpool vessels carried close to a million and a half enslaved Africans. That wealth funded many of the city's great buildings, a fact Liverpool has publicly acknowledged; its International Slavery Museum is one of the few in the world devoted to this subject.
After abolition, the port went on prospering with the cotton trade for the mills of Manchester and with emigration: millions of Europeans passed through Liverpool — many Irish fleeing the Great Famine, but also Scandinavians and others — on their way to America. The great dockside buildings, the "Three Graces" of the Pier Head, bear witness to that maritime vigour. The city also had a strong Irish community that gave it much of its character.
In the twentieth century, the decline of the port plunged Liverpool into difficult years, but the city won a new, worldwide fame: music. In the sixties the Beatles were born here, the most influential band in the history of pop, along with a whole music scene, the "Merseybeat". Today Liverpool combines its port and industrial memory with that cultural legacy, which draws visitors from all over the planet, and with a legendary football rivalry between its two big clubs.
In northwest England, the Lake District brings together the country's highest mountains and its largest lakes in a landscape of glacial valleys, meadows and still water. Inhabited since prehistory and marked by Viking settlement — from which many local place names come, such as those ending in "-thwaite" or "-fell" — it was for centuries a hard land of sheep farmers, whose flocks shaped the landscape of stone walls and scattered farms.
The fame of the Lake District was born with Romanticism. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey — the "Lake Poets" — celebrated the sublime beauty of these mountains and turned the natural landscape into a source of spiritual inspiration. Wordsworth, born and died in the region, lived at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, and his verses made the Lake District a symbol of the Romantic communion with nature. A century later, the writer and illustrator Beatrix Potter, author of the Peter Rabbit tales, lived here and used her earnings to buy farms and land that she left for conservation.
That combination of nature and culture made the Lake District one of the first focal points of the British conservation movement: much of the sensibility that gave rise to the National Trust was born here. In 1951 it was declared a national park, and in 2017 Unesco recognised it as a World Heritage Site in the cultural landscape category, valuing the interaction between pastoral farming, natural beauty and the literary and conservationist tradition that flourished here.
Beyond Manchester and Liverpool, the whole of northern England was the country's great industrial engine and the cradle of its working class. In Yorkshire, the wool industry of cities such as Leeds and Bradford mechanised and grew; the county filled with textile mills. In the northeast, around Newcastle, the coalfields fed mines, shipyards and steelworks: the River Tyne was one of the great shipbuilding centres of the world. Sheffield became famous for its steel and its cutlery. This whole northern belt was covered in chimneys, mines and workers' housing through the nineteenth century.
That industrial world forged a very marked social and political identity. Trade unionism took strong root here, along with the cooperative societies — the first modern cooperative appeared in Rochdale in 1844 — and the labour movement that would lead to the Labour Party. Working conditions, especially in the coal mines, were extremely harsh, and the struggle to improve them marked generations. The pride of the mining communities, with their brass bands and their banners, became a cultural mark of the north.
The twentieth century brought decline. Foreign competition, the exhaustion of the mines and industrial restructuring policies — especially during the Margaret Thatcher years — closed mines, factories and shipyards, leaving unemployment and battered communities. The bitter miners' strike of 1984-1985 was the most symbolic episode of that confrontation. Many northern cities later reinvented themselves around services, culture, sport and the university, but the economic gap between the north and the prosperous southeast is still one of the country's great debates, summed up in the idea of "levelling up" regional differences.
Scotland is the only part of Great Britain that Rome never managed to subdue. North of the walls of Hadrian and Antoninus lived the peoples the Romans called Caledonians and, later, Picts ("the painted ones", perhaps because of their tattoos), famous for their enigmatic carved stones bearing symbols that have still not been fully deciphered. From the fifth century, a people of Irish origin, the Scoti of the kingdom of Dál Riata, settled on the west coast and brought the Gaelic language and, with St Columba and the monastery of Iona, Celtic Christianity.
Out of the fusion of Picts and Scots came, around the ninth century, a unified kingdom under Kenneth MacAlpin, traditionally considered the first king of Scotland (Alba). To that core were later added Britons from the southwest, Angles from the southeast and Viking settlers in the islands and the north, shaping a diverse but increasingly defined kingdom. During the High Middle Ages, the kings of Scotland consolidated their authority and their Church, and kept a tense and shifting relationship with their English neighbours to the south.
These northern lands, mountainous and with a harsh climate, developed a culture of their own, with Scottish Gaelic as one of its languages, a clan system in the Highlands and a strong sense of independence. That separate identity, forged in resistance to Rome first and to the English kingdoms afterwards, would be the basis on which Scotland defended its sovereignty in the following centuries, in one of the longest and most famous struggles in the history of the islands.
At the end of the thirteenth century, the death of the child queen Margaret without a direct heir opened a succession crisis in Scotland, and the English king Edward I took the chance to try to impose his rule on the neighbouring kingdom. So began the Wars of Scottish Independence. The resistance found a popular leader in William Wallace, who defeated the English at Stirling Bridge in 1297, but was beaten at Falkirk (1298), captured and cruelly executed in London in 1305, becoming a martyr and a national symbol.
The cause was taken up by Robert the Bruce, who had himself crowned king of Scotland in 1306 and fought a long war of attrition. His great triumph came in 1314 at the Battle of Bannockburn, where he defeated a far larger English army and secured Scottish independence. In 1320, the Declaration of Arbroath, addressed to the pope, proclaimed in memorable terms Scotland's right to exist as a free nation. Finally, in 1328, England recognised the independence of the Scottish kingdom.
Those wars left an indelible mark on Scottish identity. Wallace and Bruce became national heroes, their stories became legend — amplified centuries later by the cinema — and the memory of independence won against a more powerful neighbour has nourished Scottish national feeling to this day. Scotland also maintained a long alliance with France, the "Auld Alliance", against the English threat, which shaped its politics for centuries.
The sixteenth century brought the Protestant Reformation to Scotland, driven by the preacher John Knox, which turned the country into a Presbyterian nation and clashed head-on with its queen, Mary, Queen of Scots, a Catholic. Mary's reign was tragic: forced to abdicate in 1567, she fled to England, where her cousin Elizabeth I kept her prisoner for almost twenty years and finally had her executed in 1587, accused of plotting against her. It was, however, her son who achieved what she could not: when Elizabeth died without issue in 1603, James VI of Scotland also inherited the English crown and reigned as James I, uniting both crowns in one person.
For a century, Scotland and England shared a king but remained separate kingdoms, with their own parliaments. The definitive union came in 1707. Scotland was going through a serious economic crisis, made worse by the disastrous Darién colonial venture (in Panama), which ruined much of the investing nobility. In that context, and not without controversy, bribery and pressure, the Scottish Parliament passed the Acts of Union, which merged it with the English one into the new Parliament of Great Britain, at Westminster.
The Union of 1707 was — and still is — a matter of debate. Scotland lost its parliament but kept institutions of its own that proved decisive for its identity: its Presbyterian Church (the Kirk), its legal system distinct from the English one and its education system. The measure was unpopular with much of the population, who saw it as a surrender of the nation, and that discontent fed the Jacobite risings of the following decades. But the Union also gave Scots access to trade and to the British Empire, in which they would later play an enormous part.
After the Union, many Scots — above all in the Catholic and Episcopalian Highlands — dreamed of restoring to the throne the Stuart dynasty, in exile since the Glorious Revolution. These were the Jacobites, who led several risings. The last and most famous broke out in 1745, when Charles Edward Stuart, "Bonnie Prince Charlie", landed in Scotland, gathered the Highland clans and got as far as invading England. The adventure ended on 16 April 1746 at the Battle of Culloden, near Inverness, where the government army of the Duke of Cumberland crushed the exhausted Jacobites in under an hour. It was the last battle fought on British soil.
The repression that followed was ferocious. Cumberland earned the nickname "the Butcher": Jacobites were hunted down, many were executed and the government launched a campaign to dismantle the Highland way of life. Carrying weapons, playing the bagpipes and wearing tartan and the kilt were banned, and the power of the clan chiefs was weakened. Prince Charles fled and escaped to France with the help of Flora MacDonald, who hid him and took him in disguise to the Isle of Skye, an episode that passed into popular song.
In the following decades came an even more devastating blow to the Highlands: the Highland Clearances. Between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, many landowners drove the peasantry off their land to turn it over to more profitable sheep farming. Thousands of families were evicted from the glens where they had lived for generations, sometimes brutally, with their houses burned; many crowded onto barren coasts or emigrated to the cities, to America, Canada and Australia. The Clearances emptied the Highlands, sped up the decline of Gaelic and left that landscape of empty glens and ruined villages that moves travellers today. They were one of the deepest wounds in Scottish history.
While the Highlands suffered, the Scottish cities were living through an extraordinary intellectual flowering: the Scottish Enlightenment. Between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Edinburgh and Glasgow became one of the great centres of European thought. The philosopher David Hume revolutionised philosophy; Adam Smith founded modern economics with The Wealth of Nations (1776); James Watt perfected the steam engine; and medicine, science, engineering and literature flourished. Edinburgh earned the nickname "the Athens of the North", and Scotland gave the world an astonishing density of inventions and ideas.
Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Scotland was an industrial power — Glasgow, with its Clyde shipyards, built ships for the whole empire — and a land of strong working-class and socialist tradition. But the sense of a national identity of its own never disappeared. In the second half of the twentieth century the movement for autonomy grew, channelled above all by the Scottish National Party (SNP). After a referendum, in 1999 the Scottish Parliament reopened in Edinburgh, almost three centuries after its dissolution, with wide powers over health, education, justice and other areas: this was devolution.
The next step was the question of independence. In 2014, Scotland held a referendum in which 55% of voters chose to stay in the United Kingdom against 45% in favour of independence, in a vote with a very high turnout. The matter was not settled: the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union in 2016 — which Scotland had voted mostly against — revived demands for a new referendum. Today Scotland is a nation with its own government and parliament within the United Kingdom, and the debate about its future — wider autonomy or independence — remains fully open.
Wales is the stronghold where Celtic Britain best survived. When the Anglo-Saxons occupied the east of the island, the Britons of the west kept their language and culture behind the mountains, and from them descend the Welsh people and the Welsh language (cymraeg). During the Middle Ages, Wales was not a united kingdom but a mosaic of principalities — Gwynedd, Powys, Deheubarth — often at odds with each other and pressed by the Normans, who built castles along the frontier (the "Welsh Marches"). Some rulers, such as Llywelyn the Great in the thirteenth century, managed to unify much of the country and have themselves recognised as princes of Wales.
Welsh independence ended with Edward I of England. In the campaigns of 1277 and, above all, 1282-1283, the English king conquered Gwynedd, the last great independent principality. Its ruler, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd — "Llywelyn the Last" — died in 1282, and with him the line of native princes died out. The Statute of Rhuddlan (1284) organised the conquered territory under the English crown. To secure his rule, Edward built an impressive ring of castles — Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech, Beaumaris — today a World Heritage Site and masterpieces of medieval military architecture. According to tradition, Edward presented his newborn son at Caernarfon as "Prince of Wales", a title borne ever since by the heirs to the British throne.
There was still one last great rising: that of Owain Glyndŵr, who at the beginning of the fifteenth century led a national rebellion that even convened a Welsh parliament of its own before being put down. Glyndŵr became a national hero. Finally, in Tudor times — a dynasty of Welsh origin — the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535-1542 formally integrated Wales into the kingdom of England, extending English law and imposing English in administration, a blow to the status of the Welsh language.
If the Middle Ages forged Welsh identity, the Industrial Revolution transformed it. In south Wales, the coal and iron valleys became one of the greatest industrial centres in the world. The mining basins of the Rhondda and the south, and the ironworks and steelworks of Merthyr Tydfil and Ebbw Vale, drew hundreds of thousands of workers; Cardiff grew into the largest coal-exporting port on the planet. That industry forged a combative working-class society, the cradle of the trade union movement and of a strong left-wing tradition, and with it came very Welsh institutions, from male voice choirs to nonconformist chapels.
The human cost was high: the mines left a trail of accidents and lung disease, and disasters such as Aberfan in 1966 — when a coal spoil tip buried a school and killed 144 people, most of them children — were burned into collective memory. The decline of mining in the twentieth century, completed with the closure of the pits after the 1984-1985 strike, hit the valleys hard and left whole communities without their economic reason for being.
Throughout that process, the Welsh language fought its own battle for survival. For a long time it was marginalised and even punished in schools — the "Welsh Not", the object used to humiliate children who spoke Welsh in class, is notorious — and its number of speakers fell. But since the middle of the twentieth century a strong revival movement has managed to turn the trend around: today Welsh is an official language alongside English, it is taught in schools, it has its own television channel (S4C) and its presence is growing, with the declared goal of reaching a million speakers. In 1999, Wales also got its own Assembly — today the Senedd, the Welsh Parliament — as part of devolution. Wales is today a nation proud of its language, its music and its identity.
The history of Northern Ireland cannot be understood without that of the whole of Ireland and its long, troubled relationship with England. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, after crushing Gaelic resistance in the north, the English crown drove the Plantation of Ulster: the organised colonisation of the northern province with Protestant settlers from England and, above all, from Scotland, who were given land confiscated from Irish Catholics. That policy created in the northeast of Ireland a Protestant population loyal to Britain settled alongside the native Catholic majority, sowing a religious and national division that would last for centuries.
Through the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, the movement for self-government (Home Rule) and then for independence grew in Ireland, resisted by the Protestant-unionist minority in the north, who wanted to stay joined to Britain. After the Irish War of Independence, the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 divided the island: twenty-six southern counties formed the Irish Free State (later the Republic of Ireland), while six northeastern counties, with a Protestant-unionist majority, remained in the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland, with their own parliament at Stormont. This was partition.
The new Northern Irish state was born with an underlying problem: a considerable Catholic-nationalist minority was left inside an entity dominated by the Protestant-unionist majority, and for decades suffered discrimination in employment, housing and the electoral system. That inequality, and the clash between two opposing national identities — that of those who felt British and that of those who felt Irish — built up a tension that would erupt into violence at the end of the sixties. It is worth saying it in a balanced way: in the Northern Irish conflict there were grievances and responsibilities on the part of both communities and of the state as well.
At the end of the sixties, a civil rights movement for the Catholic minority, inspired by the one in the United States, ran into repression and into the reaction of unionist sectors, and violence broke out. So began the Troubles, three decades of conflict (roughly 1968-1998) that bloodied Northern Ireland. On one side were the republican paramilitaries — the best known, the Provisional IRA — who sought reunification with the Republic of Ireland by force of arms; on the other, the loyalist paramilitaries, who defended remaining in the United Kingdom; and in between, the British army and police, whose conduct was also the subject of serious accusations.
It was a conflict of bombings, shootings, sectarian murders and traumatic episodes. In 1972, the bloodiest year, came Bloody Sunday in Derry, when British paratroopers killed fourteen unarmed civil rights demonstrators; that same year London suspended the Stormont parliament and imposed direct rule. The violence claimed more than 3,500 lives — most of them civilians — over thirty years, in a small population, leaving almost every family touched in one way or another and deeply marking cities such as Belfast and Derry, with their neighbourhoods divided by "peace walls".
The long peace process, with ups and downs, ceasefires and negotiations in which international mediation was key, culminated in the Good Friday Agreement of 10 April 1998, ratified by referendum in the north and in the south. The agreement set up a power-sharing devolved government between the two communities, recognised the principle of consent (that the status of Northern Ireland will only change if its population so decides), provided for the disarmament of the paramilitaries and created institutions of cooperation with the Republic. The resulting peace has been imperfect and at times fragile, but it transformed daily life and put an end to large-scale violence. Today Northern Ireland is still negotiating how to live together and what its identity is, a question that Brexit put back on the table.
The two capitals sum up the history of these nations well. Cardiff (Caerdydd) was a small town until coal transformed it: in the nineteenth century it became the largest coal-exporting port in the world, and its dockland district, Tiger Bay, was one of the most multicultural communities in Great Britain, with sailors from half the planet. With the decline of coal, the city reinvented itself; in 1955 it was officially recognised as the capital of Wales, and since 1999 it has been home to the Senedd, the Welsh Parliament, in its regenerated dockside area of Cardiff Bay. It is today the political, media and cultural centre of a Wales that is reasserting its identity.
Belfast, capital of Northern Ireland, also grew with industry. In the nineteenth century it became a power in linen, engineering and, above all, shipbuilding: the Titanic was built in its Harland & Wolff shipyards and launched in 1911. That industrial vigour drew workers and consolidated a city with a strong Protestant-unionist presence, though with significant Catholic districts. Belfast was later one of the main theatres of the Troubles, with divided areas and walls that still separate communities.
Today both cities show the scars and the fruits of their history. Belfast has even turned its past into an attraction: the Titanic Belfast museum recalls its industrial era, and the political murals of its neighbourhoods have paradoxically become a tourist draw and a testimony to the memory of the conflict. Cardiff and Belfast, capitals of two Celtic nations within the United Kingdom, embody the shared challenge of reconciling the past with a present of self-government, distinct identity and coexistence.