Strangest British stuff you’ll find in my UK home 🇬🇧

When I looked around my flat for a March 2023 video, I’d been living in the UK for seven years. I was still able to find things that would have seemed unusual to me back in Ontario. A heated clothes rack, an entire tea setup and a noisy air-conditioning unit all had something to say about life here.

These are things in my home, rather than a checklist of what every British household owns. Some solve a problem. Others are things I’ve come to love. They also show how different my everyday habits are from the ones I grew up with, even when I’m just doing laundry or making a drink.

My laundry lives on a rack

I don’t have a tumble dryer in this flat. Back in Ontario, using a dryer was normal for me, with the occasional thing such as jeans hanging up instead. Here, the clothes rack in our kitchen and dining area does the work. Mine came from Lakeland, and it’s electric: I can plug it in so the rails heat up.

I like having that option in winter. There isn’t an outdoor line I can use, and I found clothes took forever to dry on an ordinary rack beside the radiator. The heated one doesn’t have to be switched on all the time, either. It was off when I showed it in the video. Owning a clothes rack and having opinions about it is apparently where I’ve arrived in life.

I had tried a washer-dryer combination in my previous flat. It could run for about two hours and still leave things not fully dry. That was a frustrating contrast with my mum’s dryer back home, which I remembered getting things properly dry in roughly 20 minutes to half an hour. Those are the machines I’ve used; the experience left me happy to use a rack here.

The loudest thing in my bedroom

My room has a radiator for warmth and a portable air-conditioning unit for summer. The unit sounds like a jet engine. I had put off buying one because of the cost of the machine and the money it would take to run, but I was tired of sweating through summer nights. I wanted to be cool when I slept.

We bought ours at a discount because somebody had dropped it down the stairs. It still worked, which was the important part. It could really only cool that one room, and that was enough for me. I wasn’t trying to cool the whole flat. The bedroom was where I wanted the relief, even if the machine providing it was spectacularly loud.

Tea has taken over a corner of the kitchen

Coffee is my morning drink. Tea is for the other times, and by this point I’d been getting into loose-leaf tea. I loved the variety and wanted to try everything. Yorkshire tea was still my staple when I was in a rush, but choosing different loose teas had become fun in its own right.

I bought a bunch from a tea house in Canterbury and put them in glass jars, which I kept in the cabinet. I thought they looked pretty. I also had a cheap glass teapot from Amazon. Being able to see what was inside was part of the appeal. There was something about the whole brewing process that I really enjoyed.

Then I taught myself to crochet so I could make a little coaster for the new pot. I made about six coasters and couldn’t seem to stop. It was a fairly enthusiastic response to owning a teapot.

That setup would have been strange in my childhood home. Neither of my parents drank tea. We did have an old kettle, but it lived at the back of the cabinet and came out for making Jell-O, the packet dessert I knew by that name in Canada. A kettle, jars of tea and a favourite teapot were a different situation altogether. I loved it.

A pound’s worth of flowers

In the corner where I normally filmed, I had a bunch of daffodils. They were starting to look worse for wear by the tour, but the whole bunch had cost £1 at Tesco. That was my purchase at the time of the March 2023 video, and I thought it was wild. Buying flowers so cheaply hadn’t been something we’d done back home.

Whenever I saw daffodils appearing in the supermarket, I bought some. I loved being able to have them here, even if this particular bunch was already past its best.

After seven years, the funny thing was how little of this felt strange anymore. The rack, the tea and the other objects around the flat had become how I lived. I could point out the differences for a tour, but they were also just the things in my home.

Watch my full tour of the British things in my home on YouTube.