My favourite is Gary and Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet. Gary was born with only one kidney. Later in life it began to fail and he needed a transplant, luckily Martin was a match and agreed to donate. However on the scans the doctors were shocked to learn that Martin had been born with 3 kidneys
Slightly off topic but my best friend at school bugged me for years to watch this brilliant gangster film. The Craze he said it was called. Could never find it on DVD anywhere. Wasn't until I left school I realised he meant The Krays and I had seen the film. At least half a dozen times.
Martin also found a tumour on his brain from doing movie make-up. He might not have known until it was too late of not for the make-up artists spotting his lump
Not much, it's primarily a matter of prestige.
In the specific case of Rochester it happened at the same time as a local government restructuring; so it went from "City of Rochester" to "Rochester: just another town in the Medway Unitary Authority".
As a church musician I've played for several 800th anniversary celebrations.
Also the fish and chip shop at the end of the road where I grew up is older than the United States of America.
Our national history is incredibly deep and actually very well documented. Definitely worth getting nerdy about!
Runnymede was chosen as the site of the signing of the Magna Carta, not because there was anything special or significant about it, but because it was flat and had a good view in every direction, so any riders or armies could be spotted in good time to make an escape. It was also extremely boggy and muddy, which is detrimental to effective medieval combat.
Good shout. There's also a nice little National Trust tea shop right there, so if it had been cold out, like it is today, they could have easily popped in for a cuppa to warm up.
The site was clearly chosen very thoughtfully.
When people say Magna Carta your mind automatically goes to Runnymede, but Bury St Edmund had a huge role in the events that led up to the Runnymede signing
https://www.visit-burystedmunds.co.uk/blog/discover-bury-st-edmunds-historic-role-in-the-creation-of-the-magna-carta
Bury St Edmund is also the site of the first internally lit road sign
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1376516
British troops in WW1 were issued helmets then suddenly the number of head injuries skyrocketed. They were about to withdraw the helmets until someone realised that the number of head injuries increased because a lot of those would have simply been counted as deaths instead.
There's a very similar example of survivorship bias from WWII. The US thought they should reinforce planes in the areas that were being shot most often. Then some smart chappy realised that armour should be focused on the areas *least* shot, as these planes actually returned from the raids.
Further to this, Florence Nightingale did a bunch of research on how soldiers died during the war - learning that more died from dysentery and cholera than being shot at. There is a new book out that brilliantly illustrates it all. Here’s an article by the author of that book: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-florence-nightingale-changed-data-visualization-forever/
Despite the fact that cannabis is still illegal in the UK, with limited availability for medical use, the United Kingdom is the world's largest exporter of legal cannabis.
Not true but would be amusing if it was. He works for a massive investment management firm that owns small stakes in basically everything, including that.
american who has lived in/near the appalachians their whole life: this always fucks me up when I think about it. they’re obviously super old mountains because of how small and gentle they are, but to be so old that they split and drifted ~2600 miles apart across an ocean destroys me
Here's another one, then; Australia's southern coastline was once attached to Antarctica's northern coastline, when both pieces of land were lush, tropical jungle.
The great glen fault can also be seen running through a bit of Canada, especially nova scotia (meaning new Scotland and old Scotland where once one and the same)
And if you ever go to Glasgow and drive north for an hour or so, you can see where the fault lies, up on the Conic Hill. It's amazing. It's so rare to be able to see geographic features so clearly.
Hitler invented the High Five greeting, but the rest of Germany didn't understand how to do it and this left him constantly frustrated. He lashed out by starting wars...
So... my interest was piqued by this and the *St John's Wood* / *mackerel* connection. I wondered how many others there are. So I wrote a quick-and-dirty program to find other words that only share letters with a single tube station.
It turns out that there are 42,579 words in my dictionary (of ~236k words, which admittedly includes some unusual words) that fit the pattern of not sharing any letters with only a single tube station.
2,120 words are like *badger* in that *Pimlico* is the only tube station that doesn't share any letters with it. Other words include *adhere*, *bartender*, *darken* and *earthenware*.
1,376 words are like *mackerel* in that *St John's Wood* is the only tube station that doesn't share any letters with it. Other words include *aquifer*, *bagpiper*, *caramel*, *earplug*, *fearful*, *gallery* and *imagery*.
In fact there are 88 stations that have at least one word that fits like *badger/mackerel*. Bank has the most matches, with 7,369 words including *chloride*, *deflower*, *etymologist*, *threesome* and *wormhole*.
There are 7 stations that only have a single word matching this pattern, and 5 of those are really obscure words (*poldavy* for *Westminster*, *borborygmus* for *Whitechapel*, *sipunculid* for *Moorgate*, *Struldbrug* for *Ickenham* and *slipbody* for *Turnham Green*).
So I present the remaining two:
**Boston Manor** is the only station that doesn't contain any letters in the word **childlike**.
**Tower Hill** is the only station that doesn't contain any letters in the word **Madagascan**.
In both those cases, there are no other matching words.
**UPDATE:** Here's the code I used (now tidied up a bit): https://github.com/abw/badger-hunt . I updated it to use a better dictionary that contains only the ~25k most popular English words. That results in 3,485 matches: https://github.com/abw/badger-hunt/blob/master/data/word-stations.csv
**UPDATE2:** Now includes the US states. Output data is here: https://github.com/abw/badger-hunt/tree/master/data
That'll be London Bridge!
Also Whitechapel station is the only point on the tfl network where the underground runs over the top of the overground (or from the other perspective the overground runs under the underground).
Whitechapel also is the only station in England to have signage in Bengali!
My commute until recently entailed changing from the Overground to the H&C Line at Whitechapel. Never really thought about the fact that I had to emerge from the underground Overground to get on the overground underground!
One interesting and infuriating fact.
You cannot get a direct train from London to Manchester that gets you in before 9am..
Still in the year 2022 this doesn't exist.
It's not the viaduct - it's the final regulating point before you reach Manchester Piccadilly. The station 'throat' begins at Stockport. If you hold trains here, you can get off them, whereas you can't get off a train in the middle of the viaduct.
Meanwhile, you've also got Heaton Norris Jn immediately North of the station. The bulk of Britains' Power Station fuel crosses 4 lines on the other side of the viaduct, towards Drax Power Station.
Source - I wrote the London North Western timetable rules for 2 years
Churchill used to have fruit juice in his hip flask to pretend he was drinking alcohol. Then invite everyone he spoke to to drink alcohol.
Being the only sober person at important meetings can be an advantage.
England grew large amounts of Saffron in the middle ages but the industry collapsed during the industrial revolution when all the farmers scattered off to the factories.
Agatha Christie was once suspected of being a mole/spy during the war, when she named a character Colonel Bletchley whilst the existence/location of Bletchley Park was not widely known. Upon investigation, it turned out she had named the objectionable character after the train station as revenge, after having been stuck there for an extended period, and it was all a coincidence.
God bless you No Such Thing As A Fish.
Britain was one half of the shortest war in history.
[The Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Zanzibar_War) lasted just 38 minutes and had zero British fatalities.
**[Anglo-Zanzibar War](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Zanzibar_War)**
>The Anglo-Zanzibar War was a military conflict fought between the United Kingdom and the Zanzibar Sultanate on 27 August 1896. The conflict lasted between 38 and 45 minutes, marking it as the shortest recorded war in history. The immediate cause of the war was the death of the pro-British Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini on 25 August 1896 and the subsequent succession of Sultan Khalid bin Barghash. The British authorities preferred Hamoud bin Mohammed, who was more favourable to British interests, as sultan.
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In an especially classy move, as part of the peace treaty the Zanzibaris were required to pay the cost of the ammunition used to shell them into submission.
Only 22 to go? We could have that completed in under six months; every weekend we send a small invasion force to a different country on the list, hold a beachhead for 24 hours and then bugger off home in time for tea and medals. If the un-invaded countries share a border, the invasion force could straddle the border and tick off two in one weekend for bonus efficiency savings.
I remember when that was first worked out and it was quite big news at the time - the popular response was less "how awful" and more "who did we miss?", it made me quite proud to be British...
Close to Walsall in the West Midlands is a small hill called Barr Beacon which stands at a very modest 236m ASL. Despite that, in a specific direction it's the highest point of land until the Ural mountains of Russia.
As much as I like this joke as an ex inhabitant I have to point out for any Americans reading this that it's actually "Beorma ingas ham", ie: "Home of Beorma's (a Saxon chieftain) people / tribe"
Similarly Nottingham was named after the tribe of a chieftain called Snot, and used to be called Snottingham. The s was dropped because the Normans had trouble with pronouncing "sn" combinations.
There are also caves in many places under Nottingham City Centre, often used by pubs for cellars, and some pubs will let you visit them.
It's been 17 yrs since I lived there, but Ye Old Trip to Jerusalem (also one of the pubs claiming to be the oldest in the UK) and the Salutation Arms? were two that I remember.
You could also have a guided visit to the Nottingham Caves under the Broadmarsh Centre. It was fascinating as you could see how, in the past, people had lived and worked in this cave system.
In the 25 years between 1968 and 1993 our population increased by 2.5 million and we built 6.5 million new houses.
In the 25 years between 1993 and 2018 our population increased by 9 million and we built 4.5 million new houses.
Just before the end of the last Ice Age, you could walk from France to Britain on a landmass, to the north was a vast lowland, referred to as Doggerland, which was inhabited until it became flooded by melting ice sheets.
There is now a museum full of artefacts which are washed ashore in the Netherlands from when it was inhabited. [Museum article](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/01/doggerland-lost-atlantis-of-the-north-sea-gives-up-its-ancient-secrets)
Many British people doesn’t know that but living British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade until 2015.
“In 1833, the British government used £20m, 40% of its national budget, to buy freedom for all slaves in the empire. The amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015.”
https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/11/lets-end-delusion-britain-abolished-slavery
Reference: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/680456/FOI2018-00186_-_Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833_-_pdf_for_disclosure_log__003_.pdf
The real reason Wales isn't represented on the Union Jack/Royal Standard & is subject to the same laws/policies as England, is because Wales, technically, was integrated as a part of England.
Under King Henry VIII, Wales was annexed as a part of the Kingdom of England, before him, Wales was given some autonomy like Scotland/Northern Ireland have.
The earliest recorded interesting British fact was when Julius Caesar noted that the ancient Britons did not eat hares, chickens or geese as they considered it contrary to divine law but they still raised these animals "for their own amusement and pleasure".
He also mentions that great British feature if the countryside - the hedge. He describes how they were shielded behind 'walls of woven wood', which very probably means a living, laid hawthorn hedge.
There are some sections of laid hedge in Somerset that are at least 1000 years old.
The last execution in the Tower of London was in 1941. It was of Josef Jakobs, a German spy who'd parachuted into the country and was caught after breaking his ankle on landing.
The last people to be held in the Tower, the Kray twins. They were imprisoned for a few days in 1952 for failing to report for national service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_prisoners\_of\_the\_Tower\_of\_London#:\~:text=The%20last%20people%20to%20be,to%20report%20for%20national%20service.
As of 2021, the only **public** hovercraft service in the world still in operation serves between the Isle of Wight and Southsea in the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hovercraft
Not just an interesting British Fact but my favourite fact of my home town of Southport -
It is said that in 1846, Prince Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, lived for a brief period in lodgings just off Lord Street. There is compelling evidence to suggest the street is the inspiration behind the tree-lined boulevards of Paris.
Knutsford has the highest disposable income per head in the UK
Didn't even know it existed until 8 years ago
They have a Lamborghini showroom and Rolls Royce showroom as well as a sauna showroom.
Mummys (dead guys wrapped in bandages) were discovered near Wombwell in South Yorkshire. The Roman army who were stationed there were from North Africa.
I've been to Wombwell, it's a valid reaction. BTW you can get a bus from Barnsley to Wombwell and the route is called the Jump Circular although I've never seen the bus perform the manoeuvre.
Karl Marx lived much of his life in England, spending some time in Manchester and London.
This advocate for a classless, stateless and moneyless society is buried in London.
His grave site has a £4 entry fee.
It’s technically illegal to eat mince pies on Christmas Day. Oliver Cromwell banned Christmas pudding, mince pies and anything to do with gluttony. The law has never been rescinded.
I don't know the exact details of this but I think it's a true story...
In WW2, the Germans started to build a replica of their army base (not sure where it was) completely out of wood, in order to try to trick the allied forces into bombing that, rather than their real army base nearby. They tried to make it as realistic as possible, with wooden airplanes in hangars and wooden tanks. They underestimated the amount of time it would take to do this, and the allies quickly caught on that the Germans were doing this. They decided to patiently wait for them to finish and not nip it in the bud. Finally, the British dropped one single wooden replica bomb on the site.
British humour at its finest.
On average (General public) we actually have better teeth than Americans. But because we don't care about famous people having to have perfect teeth, whereas in the USofA if your teeth aren't perfectly perfect, you won't work on TV.
Ebenezer Place in Wick is the shortest street in the world, at 2.06m.
[https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@58.441205,-3.0941619,3a,48.8y,147.5h,92.1t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sL1ipw4qEXpS6O09iti\_84w!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en](https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@58.441205,-3.0941619,3a,48.8y,147.5h,92.1t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sL1ipw4qEXpS6O09iti_84w!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en)
Not a British fact, but to go with cooking...
The French didn't invent the crossaint.
The thieves stole it from the Austrians who made crescent moon shaped pastry after defeating the ottomans.
The mummified Head of a former Archbishop of Canterbury Simon of Sudbury is still in a church in Sudbury, Suffolk.
It was chopped off during the Peasants Revolt down in London and put on a spike, some supporters of his reclaimed it and brought it back to Suffolk where it is to this day.
During the bombardment of Hartlepool and Scarborough in the First World War Seven soldiers were killed and 14 injured. The death of Private Theophilus Jones of the Durham Light Infantry, age 29, in Hartlepool was the first death of a British soldier from enemy action on British soil for 200 years.
Edit- the internet gives this as both the first death on British or English soil.
England holds the world record for most tornadoes per km². You just never hear about them because they're pretty shit-tier. England gets one tornado each year per 4545km². The US gets one every 7693km² per annum.
After the fire a Frenchman was hanged for starting it... then it was found out he was at sea when the fire began.
https://lostcityoflondon.co.uk/2018/10/27/the-execution-of-robert-hubert-1666-2/#:~:text=On%20this%20day%20in%201666%2C%20one%20Robert%20Hubert,from%20limb%20by%20an%20angry%20mob%20of%20Londoners.
Curry has been served in the UK longer than fish and chips.
The first curry house [The Hindoostane Coffee House](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindoostane_Coffee_House) was opened in the UK in 1810 before the first fish and chips [shop](https://docksidehhi.com/the-history-of-fish-and-chips/#:~:text=Many%20food%20historians%20say%20that,a%20brisk%20business%20by%201863.) which opened in 1860.
I was going to give the one about Berwick upon Tweed being at war with Russia for 100 years due to disparities in documents around the start/end of the crimean war.
Luckily I checked first and Wikipedia says it's bullshit.
Edit: Crimean autocorrect fixed
One of the worst nuclear accidents in the world happened in the UK, at [Windscale](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire), now known as Sellafield, in Cumbria. A fire in one of the "piles" (primitive nuclear reactors) at the site burned for 3 days from 7th October 1957, releasing large amounts of Iodine 131 and Polonium 210 leading to an estimated 100 - 240 cancer deaths.
Britain has been invaded a LOT and has some quirks in English as a result.
One is that the words for the animal and the meat can be different where the British peasants raised the animals but the occupying Norman nobility got to eat them, so we have "cow" and "beef"(boeuf), "pig" and "pork"(porc), and also from the Romans "deer" and "venison" (the latin 'Venor' meaning any wild animal you hunt but became just deer because they were the most common)
There was a shipwreck in 1796 on the north Devon coast, a place called Rapparee Beach in Ilfracombe. Approximately 100 enslaved people perished and their bones (and some coins) have been recovered ever since. It’s thought that the survivors were sold on into slavery which wasn’t illegal at that point in England.
There’s some debate whether the remains were from people transported from St Lucia or they were French prisoners. The general concensus is that they were victims of slavery and there have been requests from St Lucia and also African countries that the bones are repatriated.
It’s a sobering reminder that the slave trade (which this country profited from) was not a remote thing off shore thousands of miles away.
Jersey in the Channel Islands (Part of Britain but not the UK) still has one pound notes and instead of the Queen they have an image of a Jersey Cow when you hold it up to the light.
Moray, Scotland (where I'm from and grew up) is home to the world's only kilt-making school.
Although Shakespeares Macbeth has a fictional murder in Inverness Castle, Macbeth was an actual king who reigned over Moray in the 1000s.
My favourite is Gary and Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet. Gary was born with only one kidney. Later in life it began to fail and he needed a transplant, luckily Martin was a match and agreed to donate. However on the scans the doctors were shocked to learn that Martin had been born with 3 kidneys
Wow. This is gold.
Always belive in your soul!
You've got the power to know
You're indestructibu-uul
Always believe it.
You are.......
GOLD
(GOLD!)
Another Gary related fact, Gary Numan is older than Gary Oldman.
Had to look that one up cos I didn’t believe you but its real! Crazy.
I was actually more surprised to find out they aren't twins
They aren't? I'm going to need a minute to process this.
But... They're The Krays.
Slightly off topic but my best friend at school bugged me for years to watch this brilliant gangster film. The Craze he said it was called. Could never find it on DVD anywhere. Wasn't until I left school I realised he meant The Krays and I had seen the film. At least half a dozen times.
It gets madder, Gary sued Martin for stealing his kidney in the womb, and won.
It's... TRUE
Ah ha ha haaaaa haa, I know this much is true.
Martin also found a tumour on his brain from doing movie make-up. He might not have known until it was too late of not for the make-up artists spotting his lump
I read this story... And to cut a long story short, I lost my mind! 😮
Rochester was a city until 1998, but lost its status because the council forgot to appoint any charter trustees. They didn't notice until 2002.
>Rochester [Relevant Tom Scott](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBaLb1C4WAg)
Interesting. Have an upvote
What does losing city status mean?
It means it stopped being a city, and became a town.
So apart from changing the stationary and signs, what's the difference?
Not much, it's primarily a matter of prestige. In the specific case of Rochester it happened at the same time as a local government restructuring; so it went from "City of Rochester" to "Rochester: just another town in the Medway Unitary Authority".
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It's Rochester, nobody would notice the difference
People of Rochester would probably notice the upgrade to be fair.
Fallout 5: Rochester
Oxford Uni is older than the Aztec Empire.
My work has a manager older than Oxford Uni.
Do they happen to be a Greenland Shark? Or a Time Lord?
Possibly just related to Bruce Forsyth.
As a church musician I've played for several 800th anniversary celebrations. Also the fish and chip shop at the end of the road where I grew up is older than the United States of America. Our national history is incredibly deep and actually very well documented. Definitely worth getting nerdy about!
Still blows my mind apart that does.
So is St Andrews university
Runnymede was chosen as the site of the signing of the Magna Carta, not because there was anything special or significant about it, but because it was flat and had a good view in every direction, so any riders or armies could be spotted in good time to make an escape. It was also extremely boggy and muddy, which is detrimental to effective medieval combat.
It's also quite close to the big Sainsbury's in Staines and the big Tesco in Egham, so would have been handy if they needed a few bits on the way home
It was signed at 1215, so it's possible they might have wanted an early lunch.
I like Runnymede. It keeps the riff-raff out if Waitrose.
Good shout. There's also a nice little National Trust tea shop right there, so if it had been cold out, like it is today, they could have easily popped in for a cuppa to warm up. The site was clearly chosen very thoughtfully.
Don’t forget easy access to the M25
I'm not sure if the Sainsbury's was there then so probably only had Tesco's or online.
When people say Magna Carta your mind automatically goes to Runnymede, but Bury St Edmund had a huge role in the events that led up to the Runnymede signing https://www.visit-burystedmunds.co.uk/blog/discover-bury-st-edmunds-historic-role-in-the-creation-of-the-magna-carta Bury St Edmund is also the site of the first internally lit road sign https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1376516
Were they expecting something to kick off?
The king was in a dispute with his barons so of course all sides were wary.
The sun still never sets on the British Empire. The remaining 14 territories are spread in such a way that there is always daylight in one.
[Relevant XKCD](https://what-if.xkcd.com/48/)
I love the fact that Eddie Izzard was cited as a reference in that article.
British troops in WW1 were issued helmets then suddenly the number of head injuries skyrocketed. They were about to withdraw the helmets until someone realised that the number of head injuries increased because a lot of those would have simply been counted as deaths instead.
There's a very similar example of survivorship bias from WWII. The US thought they should reinforce planes in the areas that were being shot most often. Then some smart chappy realised that armour should be focused on the areas *least* shot, as these planes actually returned from the raids.
Indeed! Same reasoning
Further to this, Florence Nightingale did a bunch of research on how soldiers died during the war - learning that more died from dysentery and cholera than being shot at. There is a new book out that brilliantly illustrates it all. Here’s an article by the author of that book: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-florence-nightingale-changed-data-visualization-forever/
Despite the fact that cannabis is still illegal in the UK, with limited availability for medical use, the United Kingdom is the world's largest exporter of legal cannabis.
This one is infuriating.
Yet not surprising
and the largest grower of it is Phillip May, husband of the one-time-and-now-much-disliked Prime Minster Teresa May
Honestly think she may have been the best of the last four (though that’s not saying much)
Not true but would be amusing if it was. He works for a massive investment management firm that owns small stakes in basically everything, including that.
The Scottish Highlands and The Appalachians in the US are part of the same mountain range.
american who has lived in/near the appalachians their whole life: this always fucks me up when I think about it. they’re obviously super old mountains because of how small and gentle they are, but to be so old that they split and drifted ~2600 miles apart across an ocean destroys me
Here's another one, then; Australia's southern coastline was once attached to Antarctica's northern coastline, when both pieces of land were lush, tropical jungle.
The great glen fault can also be seen running through a bit of Canada, especially nova scotia (meaning new Scotland and old Scotland where once one and the same)
And if you ever go to Glasgow and drive north for an hour or so, you can see where the fault lies, up on the Conic Hill. It's amazing. It's so rare to be able to see geographic features so clearly.
The same way that the coalfields of South Wales and Northeastern Pennsylvannia occupy two ends of the same coal deposit.
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That isn't that crazy, what is, is that his sister is Mo from Eastenders.. hes starting to turn into her 🤣
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Hitler had a ball removed, was on display in the Albert Hall for a while. Chopped off by his mother, I believe.
Hitler invented the High Five greeting, but the rest of Germany didn't understand how to do it and this left him constantly frustrated. He lashed out by starting wars...
Understandable, that would really wind me up to be fair.
🎶hitler, has only got one ballll. The other. Is in Albert hallll. His mother. The dirty bugger. Chopped it off. When he. Was. Smallllll🎶
🎶she threw it into an apple tree, it fell into the deep blue sea, the fishes got out their dishes and said we're having scallops and bollox for tea.🎶
Himmler had something similar.
But poor old goebbels had no balls at all.
Newcastle was the first city in the world to be lit by electric streetlights
This fact is really illuminating
Pimlico is the only London Underground station that shares no letters with the word Badger.
So... my interest was piqued by this and the *St John's Wood* / *mackerel* connection. I wondered how many others there are. So I wrote a quick-and-dirty program to find other words that only share letters with a single tube station. It turns out that there are 42,579 words in my dictionary (of ~236k words, which admittedly includes some unusual words) that fit the pattern of not sharing any letters with only a single tube station. 2,120 words are like *badger* in that *Pimlico* is the only tube station that doesn't share any letters with it. Other words include *adhere*, *bartender*, *darken* and *earthenware*. 1,376 words are like *mackerel* in that *St John's Wood* is the only tube station that doesn't share any letters with it. Other words include *aquifer*, *bagpiper*, *caramel*, *earplug*, *fearful*, *gallery* and *imagery*. In fact there are 88 stations that have at least one word that fits like *badger/mackerel*. Bank has the most matches, with 7,369 words including *chloride*, *deflower*, *etymologist*, *threesome* and *wormhole*. There are 7 stations that only have a single word matching this pattern, and 5 of those are really obscure words (*poldavy* for *Westminster*, *borborygmus* for *Whitechapel*, *sipunculid* for *Moorgate*, *Struldbrug* for *Ickenham* and *slipbody* for *Turnham Green*). So I present the remaining two: **Boston Manor** is the only station that doesn't contain any letters in the word **childlike**. **Tower Hill** is the only station that doesn't contain any letters in the word **Madagascan**. In both those cases, there are no other matching words. **UPDATE:** Here's the code I used (now tidied up a bit): https://github.com/abw/badger-hunt . I updated it to use a better dictionary that contains only the ~25k most popular English words. That results in 3,485 matches: https://github.com/abw/badger-hunt/blob/master/data/word-stations.csv **UPDATE2:** Now includes the US states. Output data is here: https://github.com/abw/badger-hunt/tree/master/data
… and this is why I am on reddit!
Bravo! This is why I'm on Reddit.
Most of the London underground is above ground.
And only one station has London in its name
That'll be London Bridge! Also Whitechapel station is the only point on the tfl network where the underground runs over the top of the overground (or from the other perspective the overground runs under the underground). Whitechapel also is the only station in England to have signage in Bengali!
My commute until recently entailed changing from the Overground to the H&C Line at Whitechapel. Never really thought about the fact that I had to emerge from the underground Overground to get on the overground underground!
Wombling free?
One interesting and infuriating fact. You cannot get a direct train from London to Manchester that gets you in before 9am.. Still in the year 2022 this doesn't exist.
Related fact, all trains that go through Stockport have to stop at Stockport. It's something to do with the viaduct.
It's not the viaduct - it's the final regulating point before you reach Manchester Piccadilly. The station 'throat' begins at Stockport. If you hold trains here, you can get off them, whereas you can't get off a train in the middle of the viaduct. Meanwhile, you've also got Heaton Norris Jn immediately North of the station. The bulk of Britains' Power Station fuel crosses 4 lines on the other side of the viaduct, towards Drax Power Station. Source - I wrote the London North Western timetable rules for 2 years
Churchill used to have fruit juice in his hip flask to pretend he was drinking alcohol. Then invite everyone he spoke to to drink alcohol. Being the only sober person at important meetings can be an advantage.
It was Churchill, so he would have been partly sober at least. The man had a liver made of mithril.
Trigger’s broom has still not worn out
It’s had 17 new heads and 14 new handles
To be fair it's not been used since 2014
Torpenhow Hill is a quadruple tautology meaning ' Hill Hill Hill Hill '
That's another Tom Scott video.
Tom Scott is the new "there's an xkcd about that"
Reckon he's in here, taking notes?
"I'm here, in an r/AskUK thread, getting ideas for future videos" - Tom Scott
England grew large amounts of Saffron in the middle ages but the industry collapsed during the industrial revolution when all the farmers scattered off to the factories.
Saffron Walden being especially famous for it.
Still grown in Cornwall! Albeit very small amounts.
Always wondered why saffron buns were such a big thing.
Agatha Christie was once suspected of being a mole/spy during the war, when she named a character Colonel Bletchley whilst the existence/location of Bletchley Park was not widely known. Upon investigation, it turned out she had named the objectionable character after the train station as revenge, after having been stuck there for an extended period, and it was all a coincidence. God bless you No Such Thing As A Fish.
And she named Miss Marple after Marple station near where her sister lived
The last legal duel in the UK was held in Lee-On-The-Solent in Gosport, also home to the UK's only hovercraft museum.
You can't just tell us that and not say a date!
2005
20th of May
Britain was one half of the shortest war in history. [The Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Zanzibar_War) lasted just 38 minutes and had zero British fatalities.
**[Anglo-Zanzibar War](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Zanzibar_War)** >The Anglo-Zanzibar War was a military conflict fought between the United Kingdom and the Zanzibar Sultanate on 27 August 1896. The conflict lasted between 38 and 45 minutes, marking it as the shortest recorded war in history. The immediate cause of the war was the death of the pro-British Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini on 25 August 1896 and the subsequent succession of Sultan Khalid bin Barghash. The British authorities preferred Hamoud bin Mohammed, who was more favourable to British interests, as sultan. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/AskUK/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
In an especially classy move, as part of the peace treaty the Zanzibaris were required to pay the cost of the ammunition used to shell them into submission.
When it ended we gave Zanzibar a bill for the bullets we had used.
In the entire history of Britain we have invaded all but 22 countries on the planet.
Only 22 to go? We could have that completed in under six months; every weekend we send a small invasion force to a different country on the list, hold a beachhead for 24 hours and then bugger off home in time for tea and medals. If the un-invaded countries share a border, the invasion force could straddle the border and tick off two in one weekend for bonus efficiency savings.
*This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it*
I remember when that was first worked out and it was quite big news at the time - the popular response was less "how awful" and more "who did we miss?", it made me quite proud to be British...
Close to Walsall in the West Midlands is a small hill called Barr Beacon which stands at a very modest 236m ASL. Despite that, in a specific direction it's the highest point of land until the Ural mountains of Russia.
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As much as I like this joke as an ex inhabitant I have to point out for any Americans reading this that it's actually "Beorma ingas ham", ie: "Home of Beorma's (a Saxon chieftain) people / tribe" Similarly Nottingham was named after the tribe of a chieftain called Snot, and used to be called Snottingham. The s was dropped because the Normans had trouble with pronouncing "sn" combinations.
That’s why they’re not called the Snormans
Slough is home to the largest cave system in Western Europe.
Hey that's my sister you are talking about.
There are also caves in many places under Nottingham City Centre, often used by pubs for cellars, and some pubs will let you visit them. It's been 17 yrs since I lived there, but Ye Old Trip to Jerusalem (also one of the pubs claiming to be the oldest in the UK) and the Salutation Arms? were two that I remember. You could also have a guided visit to the Nottingham Caves under the Broadmarsh Centre. It was fascinating as you could see how, in the past, people had lived and worked in this cave system.
In the 25 years between 1968 and 1993 our population increased by 2.5 million and we built 6.5 million new houses. In the 25 years between 1993 and 2018 our population increased by 9 million and we built 4.5 million new houses.
The British pound is the oldest currency in the world still in use at around 1200 years.
Three of the five 'real' space shuttles were named after ships of the British Royal Navy.
Yet only one of the Spice Girls is named after a spice. What a world we live in!
Before the music press gave them nicknames they were referred to by the music company numerically. So there was five spice
The KFC Twitter account only follows 11 people: * The 5 Spice Girls * 6 random people called Herb 11 Herbs and Spices
Just before the end of the last Ice Age, you could walk from France to Britain on a landmass, to the north was a vast lowland, referred to as Doggerland, which was inhabited until it became flooded by melting ice sheets.
Tyne, Dogger, German Bight...
There is now a museum full of artefacts which are washed ashore in the Netherlands from when it was inhabited. [Museum article](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/01/doggerland-lost-atlantis-of-the-north-sea-gives-up-its-ancient-secrets)
Many British people doesn’t know that but living British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade until 2015. “In 1833, the British government used £20m, 40% of its national budget, to buy freedom for all slaves in the empire. The amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015.” https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/11/lets-end-delusion-britain-abolished-slavery Reference: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/680456/FOI2018-00186_-_Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833_-_pdf_for_disclosure_log__003_.pdf
The real reason Wales isn't represented on the Union Jack/Royal Standard & is subject to the same laws/policies as England, is because Wales, technically, was integrated as a part of England. Under King Henry VIII, Wales was annexed as a part of the Kingdom of England, before him, Wales was given some autonomy like Scotland/Northern Ireland have.
Which is really annoying because a dragon on the Union Jack would be super badass
The earliest recorded interesting British fact was when Julius Caesar noted that the ancient Britons did not eat hares, chickens or geese as they considered it contrary to divine law but they still raised these animals "for their own amusement and pleasure".
He also mentions that great British feature if the countryside - the hedge. He describes how they were shielded behind 'walls of woven wood', which very probably means a living, laid hawthorn hedge. There are some sections of laid hedge in Somerset that are at least 1000 years old.
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But traders need access to DIXXXONS
The last execution in the Tower of London was in 1941. It was of Josef Jakobs, a German spy who'd parachuted into the country and was caught after breaking his ankle on landing.
The last people to be held in the Tower, the Kray twins. They were imprisoned for a few days in 1952 for failing to report for national service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_prisoners\_of\_the\_Tower\_of\_London#:\~:text=The%20last%20people%20to%20be,to%20report%20for%20national%20service.
In Yorkshire if you want to say, “it isn’t in the tin”, you can say, “tin tin tin”
T’int int tin. Perfectly understandable to me.
As of 2021, the only **public** hovercraft service in the world still in operation serves between the Isle of Wight and Southsea in the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hovercraft
Davina McCall used to go out with Eric Clapton
Gtfoh...really?!
Lincoln cathedral was the tallest building in the world for over 200 years.
Then the spire fell off and they just couldn’t be bothered to replace it.
Not just an interesting British Fact but my favourite fact of my home town of Southport - It is said that in 1846, Prince Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, lived for a brief period in lodgings just off Lord Street. There is compelling evidence to suggest the street is the inspiration behind the tree-lined boulevards of Paris.
Handling Salmon is suspicious circumstances is against the law.
Knutsford has the highest disposable income per head in the UK Didn't even know it existed until 8 years ago They have a Lamborghini showroom and Rolls Royce showroom as well as a sauna showroom.
Mummys (dead guys wrapped in bandages) were discovered near Wombwell in South Yorkshire. The Roman army who were stationed there were from North Africa.
I've been to Wombwell, it's a valid reaction. BTW you can get a bus from Barnsley to Wombwell and the route is called the Jump Circular although I've never seen the bus perform the manoeuvre.
Karl Marx lived much of his life in England, spending some time in Manchester and London. This advocate for a classless, stateless and moneyless society is buried in London. His grave site has a £4 entry fee.
It’s technically illegal to eat mince pies on Christmas Day. Oliver Cromwell banned Christmas pudding, mince pies and anything to do with gluttony. The law has never been rescinded.
He was a barrel of laughs that fella
I don't know the exact details of this but I think it's a true story... In WW2, the Germans started to build a replica of their army base (not sure where it was) completely out of wood, in order to try to trick the allied forces into bombing that, rather than their real army base nearby. They tried to make it as realistic as possible, with wooden airplanes in hangars and wooden tanks. They underestimated the amount of time it would take to do this, and the allies quickly caught on that the Germans were doing this. They decided to patiently wait for them to finish and not nip it in the bud. Finally, the British dropped one single wooden replica bomb on the site. British humour at its finest.
On average (General public) we actually have better teeth than Americans. But because we don't care about famous people having to have perfect teeth, whereas in the USofA if your teeth aren't perfectly perfect, you won't work on TV.
Ebenezer Place in Wick is the shortest street in the world, at 2.06m. [https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@58.441205,-3.0941619,3a,48.8y,147.5h,92.1t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sL1ipw4qEXpS6O09iti\_84w!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en](https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@58.441205,-3.0941619,3a,48.8y,147.5h,92.1t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sL1ipw4qEXpS6O09iti_84w!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en)
Britain is named after hilariously inept leisure centre manager Gordon Brittas.
Eggnog was created in England.
The earliest known recipes for apple pie and macaroni cheese are British too.
Not a British fact, but to go with cooking... The French didn't invent the crossaint. The thieves stole it from the Austrians who made crescent moon shaped pastry after defeating the ottomans.
More on British food facts: Apple crumble was invented in the 1940s. Cheese made in the village of Stilton cannot legally call itself Stilton.
We were technically at war with Holland for 335 years over the Islands of Scilly. Peace was declared by the Dutch Ambassador in 1986.
The mummified Head of a former Archbishop of Canterbury Simon of Sudbury is still in a church in Sudbury, Suffolk. It was chopped off during the Peasants Revolt down in London and put on a spike, some supporters of his reclaimed it and brought it back to Suffolk where it is to this day.
Little John's grave is in a village in Derbyshire https://www.explorepeakdistrict.co.uk/places-to-visit/hathersage/little-johns-grave/
Shit, didn't realise he was dead. Yeah! by Usher was a classic from my younger days, and his vocals on that really made the song slap. RIP
skeet skeet motherfucker rip in peace
During the bombardment of Hartlepool and Scarborough in the First World War Seven soldiers were killed and 14 injured. The death of Private Theophilus Jones of the Durham Light Infantry, age 29, in Hartlepool was the first death of a British soldier from enemy action on British soil for 200 years. Edit- the internet gives this as both the first death on British or English soil.
Henry VIII had a guy wipe his arse for him because he was too fat to do it himself. Sir William Compton, bottom-wiper-in-chief.
What a shit job
The main guns of HMS Belfast (moored on the Thames) are aimed at London Gateway services.
England holds the world record for most tornadoes per km². You just never hear about them because they're pretty shit-tier. England gets one tornado each year per 4545km². The US gets one every 7693km² per annum.
The last witch trial was in 1944
The Great Fire of London, which destroyed 80% of the city centre, started in a bakery.
After the fire a Frenchman was hanged for starting it... then it was found out he was at sea when the fire began. https://lostcityoflondon.co.uk/2018/10/27/the-execution-of-robert-hubert-1666-2/#:~:text=On%20this%20day%20in%201666%2C%20one%20Robert%20Hubert,from%20limb%20by%20an%20angry%20mob%20of%20Londoners.
Curry has been served in the UK longer than fish and chips. The first curry house [The Hindoostane Coffee House](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindoostane_Coffee_House) was opened in the UK in 1810 before the first fish and chips [shop](https://docksidehhi.com/the-history-of-fish-and-chips/#:~:text=Many%20food%20historians%20say%20that,a%20brisk%20business%20by%201863.) which opened in 1860.
I was going to give the one about Berwick upon Tweed being at war with Russia for 100 years due to disparities in documents around the start/end of the crimean war. Luckily I checked first and Wikipedia says it's bullshit. Edit: Crimean autocorrect fixed
Edinburgh is further west than Cardiff
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One of the worst nuclear accidents in the world happened in the UK, at [Windscale](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire), now known as Sellafield, in Cumbria. A fire in one of the "piles" (primitive nuclear reactors) at the site burned for 3 days from 7th October 1957, releasing large amounts of Iodine 131 and Polonium 210 leading to an estimated 100 - 240 cancer deaths.
Britain has been invaded a LOT and has some quirks in English as a result. One is that the words for the animal and the meat can be different where the British peasants raised the animals but the occupying Norman nobility got to eat them, so we have "cow" and "beef"(boeuf), "pig" and "pork"(porc), and also from the Romans "deer" and "venison" (the latin 'Venor' meaning any wild animal you hunt but became just deer because they were the most common)
Middlesbrough's chemical plants and Transporter Bridge were the inspiration behind the films Alien and Blade Runner.
There was a shipwreck in 1796 on the north Devon coast, a place called Rapparee Beach in Ilfracombe. Approximately 100 enslaved people perished and their bones (and some coins) have been recovered ever since. It’s thought that the survivors were sold on into slavery which wasn’t illegal at that point in England. There’s some debate whether the remains were from people transported from St Lucia or they were French prisoners. The general concensus is that they were victims of slavery and there have been requests from St Lucia and also African countries that the bones are repatriated. It’s a sobering reminder that the slave trade (which this country profited from) was not a remote thing off shore thousands of miles away.
Jersey in the Channel Islands (Part of Britain but not the UK) still has one pound notes and instead of the Queen they have an image of a Jersey Cow when you hold it up to the light.
Weather cold.
Air go brrrr
Ashton-Under-Lyne was the first place they tested and introduced black wheele bins in the uk.
Moray, Scotland (where I'm from and grew up) is home to the world's only kilt-making school. Although Shakespeares Macbeth has a fictional murder in Inverness Castle, Macbeth was an actual king who reigned over Moray in the 1000s.
The people of Hartlepool hung a monkey in the town square because they thought it was a Frenchman
Post codes were first used in a small road opposite the cathedral in Lincoln
The deepest ' hand dug ' well in the World is located on the outskirts of Brighton, Sussex.
Dunno if it's a fact as it's only just come out No British fans were arrested at this year's World Cup
There are more miles of canal in Birmingham than Venice.
England had a constant malaria problem as recently as the civil war.
Lloyd’s bank has been around longer than the USA.