British Culture

When I first moved to England, I watched a lot of Top Gear. I don’t even like cars. I was applying for jobs, getting rejected at interviews and spending plenty of time at home, where British television became a surprisingly useful way to work out the humour and references around me.

By my July 2022 video, I’d lived here for six years. My advice to somebody new was to watch and learn, while accepting that things would be different. Television helped, but so did ordinary office life and paying attention to how people behaved in situations such as offering a drink or going to the pub.

Television gave me some context

At first, the unfamiliar shows and people were overwhelming. I didn’t know who anybody was or what I was watching. Spending time with different programmes made things start to make sense, including the banter, sarcasm and pop-culture references I’d hear elsewhere.

It didn’t even have to be a programme I especially liked. I watched an enormous amount of Can’t Pay? We’ll Take It Away! when I first arrived, along with all that Top Gear. I found there were things about the culture that were difficult to explain directly but easier to pick up while watching. It was my strongest recommendation in the video, even if the first reaction to a title such as Homes Under the Hammer was complete confusion.

Tea doesn’t have to be your own favourite

In the houses and flats I visited, friends and acquaintances offered me tea. Sometimes coffee was an option, too, but the tea offer was something I kept encountering. Having a box in the cupboard made sense even if I wasn’t going to drink it every day myself.

At that point I mostly drank tea in the dark, cold part of winter, and Yorkshire was my choice. I still kept some available for visitors. A huge selection wasn’t the point. My advice was to have something basic so you could offer a cup to a friend, a family member or even a plumber who came round.

A round means taking a turn

One custom I noticed at the pub was buying drinks in rounds. If a group was doing that, one person paid for everybody’s drinks, then another person took a turn. Being included meant you were expected to buy the others a drink when your turn came. It was more firmly established than the occasional drink-buying I’d experienced with friends back in Canada.

You didn’t have to join in. If you only wanted one drink or didn’t want to drink much, my advice was to say at the beginning that you would buy your own. That avoids letting somebody buy yours with an expectation that you’ll take a turn later. I hadn’t really had the same after-work pub experience in my Canadian jobs, so this was something to pay attention to here.

Give people some room

The public-transport etiquette I described was straightforward: when there are plenty of empty seats, take one away from the other passengers. I find it unsettling when somebody sits right beside me in an almost empty bus or train. A packed carriage is a different situation. Of course sitting beside somebody is fine when the seats need to be used.

I also took queueing seriously. Whether the line was for a bus, the post office or an ATM, my advice was to go to the back instead of slipping in as it moved along. People might not confront a queue-jumper directly, but the looks and tutting could still make the disapproval quite clear.

The office was its own lesson

Some things felt familiar. Apologising was one of them. As a Canadian, I thought the fondness for saying sorry made sense, and I respected it. My advice for an awkward situation was often simply to apologise.

Working in an office gave me a particularly good chance to learn from real people and their day-to-day lives. That mattered more than assuming every stereotype I’d heard was true. Some seemed rooted in reality, some were partly true and others were nonsense. I wanted newcomers to keep those assumptions in the background and observe the place where they actually settled.

I find differences exciting, and keeping an open mind was the approach I recommended. Watching television and people around me gradually made the culture easier to understand. Watching, listening and giving it time was my advice.

Watch my full video about fitting into British culture on YouTube.