United Kingdom
By medium: British art - British cinema (*) - British literature and philosophy - British music (*)
By sensibility: British erotica - British exploitation
Various: Archigram - English - Industrial Revolution (started in the UK) - London - Oz (magazine)
By era: Mod movement - swinging London - Victorian era
Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway painted (1844) - William Turner
This 1844 painting by William Turner predates the style of Impressionism
The Crystal Palace (1851) - Joseph Paxton
This building, built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, symbolizes the rise of consumer culture and the start of industrial design.
Culture of the United Kingdom
The United Kingdom contains some of the world's leading universities, including the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford and the University of London (which incorporates, amongst others, King's College London, Imperial College London, The London School of Economics and University College London). It has produced many great scholars, scientists and engineers including Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Adam Smith, James Clark Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel; the nation is credited with many inventions including the locomotive, vaccination, television, the railway, and both the internal combustion and the jet engine.--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom#Culture [Mar 2006]The culture of the United Kingdom is rich and varied, and has been influential on culture on a worldwide scale.
It is a European state, and has many cultural links with its former colonies, particularly those that use the English language (the Anglosphere). Considerable contributions to British culture have been made over the last half-century by immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent and the West Indies. The origins of the UK as a political union of formerly independent states has resulted in the preservation of distinctive cultures in each of the home nations. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_the_United_Kingdom [Mar 2006]
British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (1998) - Leon Hunt
Flares, lava lamps, safari suits and a national cinema dominated by smutty comedy and cheap softcore have all made 1970s British popular culture appear too gruesome to recycle as nostalgia and too offensive for academic study. But the generic artifacts of the 1970s have become important reference points in contemporary popular culture.
British Low Culture revisits the 1970s through some of its least respectable films and television programs, from Benny Hill to Confessions of a Windowcleaner. Identifying the trickle down of permissiveness into mass consumption as a key feature of the 1970s, Leon Hunt considers the values of an ostensibly "bad" decade and analyzes its implications for issues of taste and cultural capital. Offering insights into the complexities of popular culture and popular memory, British Low Culture fills an important gap in the study of British cultural history.