You’ll Only Find THIS in Britain 🇬🇧

After seven years in the UK, I still kept finding things that surprised me. Some were foods I wanted to try. Some were traditions I loved hearing about, and others were ordinary little interactions that seemed wonderfully British to me. I liked that living here could still produce a moment of: sorry, what am I looking at?

A pie inside a roll

The Wigan kebab was one of those moments. It was a little pie inside a buttered roll. A meat pie already sounded delicious to me, and then someone had decided it needed bread around it as well. The closest thing I could think of was a chip butty, a sandwich with fries inside. I respected the enthusiasm for carbs because I loved them too.

I hadn’t eaten a Wigan kebab, but I really wanted to. I couldn’t say I’d seen them at the fast-food places around me in Kent. I could make one myself, although that didn’t feel quite the same. I kept suggesting that I should do it, then putting off the exact date. It was a food I wanted to try, not one I’d already tasted and could recommend from experience.

A pie that looks back at you

Stargazy pie produced a very different first reaction. It was a pastry-based fish pie, which sounded fine until I saw the fish heads sticking out of it. Looking at them made me want to cry. There was something about the heads appearing to look at me that made me question all my life choices.

I loved trying new foods, and I appreciated that the UK had so many interesting dishes. Would I try this one? Probably. I thought you should try things twice, and I couldn’t see a reason to refuse it simply because I disliked how it looked. That didn’t make the staring fish heads any less alarming. My interest in tasting it and my reaction to its appearance were both there at once.

The biscuit offer that needs a few rounds

Not everything that surprised me involved an unusual dish. When I worked in an office, I often noticed a little exchange when someone offered a biscuit. The person being offered it would say they shouldn’t. The person with the tin would encourage them. There might be another hesitation, another offer, and then an eventual acceptance.

I thought it was sweet and funny. Both people seemed to know that the biscuit would be taken, but they still had to do the little dance first. Thinking back, I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen a British person accept something on the first offer. That was my impression from those interactions, and I found myself wondering whether anyone else had noticed it.

Afternoon tea at the hair salon

Afternoon tea, crumpets, clotted cream and the argument about jam were familiar features of conversations about Britain. I thought they were almost too obvious to include. Then, while I was out exploring, I walked past a hair salon advertising a haircut, afternoon tea and crumpets. That combination was new to me.

I hadn’t gone inside to find out how it worked. I just saw the offer and thought it was hilarious. Did you have the crumpets before the haircut, during it or afterwards? What happened with bits of hair flying around? I didn’t know. I needed a haircut myself, but spotting that advert wasn’t the same as having tried the service. The unanswered practical questions were part of why it made me laugh.

My peach festival comparison

Looking into British festivals sent me down another rabbit hole. I’d celebrated Bonfire Night for years, and it had become an annual tradition for me. When I stopped and thought about it, though, it still seemed wild. Then I came across the blazing tar barrels in the streets at Ottery St Mary in East Devon, which took the idea much further than the celebrations I knew.

I tried to think of a comparison from festivals I’d experienced in Ontario. The one that came to mind was a peach festival: peaches, peach ice cream, peach pies and peach cobblers. Peaches were awesome, but they were difficult to compare with burning barrels of tar. Canada was a huge country, so I was thinking about my own experiences rather than claiming that was everything it had to offer.

Once I started looking into those festivals, I couldn’t stop. I loved that the UK had so many strange things to discover. That didn’t mean I’d like every one of them. I could want a pie in a roll, be unsettled by another pie looking at me and still appreciate living somewhere that kept giving me new things to talk about.

Watch my discoveries of unusual British foods and traditions.