Chapter 4 · A modern, thriving society

Arts and culture: Life in the UK test study notes

British culture has produced world-famous music, theatre, art, architecture, design and literature. Purcell, Handel, Holst, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Walton and Britten are among the best-known composers. Every summer the BBC Proms bring classical concerts to the Royal Albert Hall, ending with the famous Last Night. Pop and rock matter just as much: British bands have influenced the world since the 1960s. Festivals such as Glastonbury draw huge crowds, and the Mercury Prize and Brit Awards celebrate new music. The National Eisteddfod is a Welsh festival of music and poetry. London's West End is the centre of British theatre, from Andrew Lloyd Webber's musicals to Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas. Pantomime is a Christmas tradition and Edinburgh's summer festivals include the Fringe. In art, foreign painters such as Holbein and Van Dyck worked at the royal court. Then British artists such as Gainsborough, Constable and Turner became famous. They were followed later by the Pre-Raphaelites, Henry Moore, Lucian Freud and David Hockney. Buildings range from medieval cathedrals to the work of Wren, Robert Adam, Lutyens and modern international architects, and gardens by Capability Brown and Gertrude Jekyll are admired too. Britain's literature runs from Beowulf and Chaucer through Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens to J K Rowling. The Nobel Prize in Literature has gone to several British writers, and the Booker Prize rewards the best fiction each year.

Key facts to remember

Henry Purcell – 17th-century organist at Westminster Abbey who wrote church music and operas.
George Frederick Handel – German-born, became British in 1727; wrote Water Music for George I and the oratorio Messiah.
Gustav Holst – The Planets. Sir Edward Elgar – the Pomp and Circumstance Marches ('Land of Hope and Glory').
Ralph Vaughan Williams drew on English folk music; Sir William Walton wrote Façade, Belshazzar's Feast and coronation marches for George VI and Elizabeth II.
Benjamin Britten – the opera Peter Grimes and A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra; founded the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk.
The Proms – eight weeks of summer concerts, mainly at the Royal Albert Hall; first conducted by Sir Henry Wood in 1895 and run by the BBC since 1927.
Music festivals – examples are Glastonbury, the V Festival (held until 2017) and the Isle of Wight Festival; the National Eisteddfod celebrates Welsh culture.
Mercury Prize – an award for the best UK or Irish album; Brit Awards – honours for British groups and solo artists.
Andrew Lloyd Webber – Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, The Phantom of the Opera. Gilbert and Sullivan – comic operas such as The Mikado, HMS Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance.
Pantomimes are Christmas shows based on fairy stories, with a Dame, a female character traditionally played by a man. The Laurence Olivier Awards honour London theatre.
1952 – Agatha Christie's murder-mystery play The Mousetrap opened in the West End; it has run without a break ever since, the longest first run of any show.
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the largest part of the Edinburgh Festival each summer, mainly showcases theatre and comedy, much of it experimental.
Holbein (for Henry VIII) and Van Dyck (for Charles I) were foreign court painters; Gainsborough set portraits in country scenery; David Allan painted The Origin of Painting.
John Constable was a landscape painter famous for his views of Dedham Vale; Joseph Turner did much to raise the status of landscape painting.
1984 – the Turner Prize, named after the painter Joseph Turner, was set up to celebrate contemporary art.
The Pre-Raphaelites (19th century) painted detailed, brightly coloured religious and literary scenes.
Sir John Lavery (Belfast-born portrait painter), Henry Moore (sculpture), John Petts (engravings and stained glass), Lucian Freud (portraits), David Hockney (1960s pop art).
Architecture: medieval cathedrals such as Durham, Lincoln, Canterbury and Salisbury; Inigo Jones's Queen's House and Banqueting House; Wren's St Paul's; Robert Adam's buildings and interiors.
Inigo Jones and later Sir Christopher Wren shaped 17th-century English architecture; Jones's designs include the Banqueting House in Whitehall and the Queen's House at Greenwich.
Gothic revival buildings include St Pancras Station and the Houses of Parliament; Lutyens planned New Delhi and designed the Cenotaph; Foster, Rogers and Hadid designed major modern buildings.
Gardens: Capability Brown's natural-looking parkland; Gertrude Jekyll's colourful gardens, often for houses by Lutyens.
Design: Chippendale (furniture), Clarice Cliff (Art Deco ceramics), Terence Conran (interiors); fashion by Vivienne Westwood, Mary Quant and Alexander McQueen.
Writers: Nobel winners William Golding, Seamus Heaney and Harold Pinter; Austen, Dickens, Stevenson, Hardy, Conan Doyle, Waugh, Amis, Greene and Rowling.
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped and Treasure Island.
The Booker Prize is awarded each year for the best novel, not poetry. The handbook calls it the Man Booker Prize; since 2019 it has been called the Booker Prize.
Poetry: Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare's sonnets, Milton, Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Shelley, the Brownings, Owen, Sassoon and Dylan Thomas; many writers are honoured in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.
Beowulf – an Anglo-Saxon poem about a hero who fights monsters, still read today in modern English translations.
A sonnet is a poem that always has 14 lines; Shakespeare wrote many of them.
John Milton, writing from a Protestant viewpoint, produced the epic poem Paradise Lost.
Famous poems: Wordsworth's The Daffodils ('I wander'd lonely as a cloud'), Lord Byron's She Walks in Beauty and Robert Browning's Home Thoughts from Abroad.
Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon wrote poetry shaped by their time as soldiers in the First World War; Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth mourns the soldiers who died in it.

Test yourself on chapter 4

Answer practice questions with instant feedback, and review the ones you get wrong.

Practise this chapter

These notes summarise the official handbook, Life in the United Kingdom: A Guide for New Residents (3rd edition), which all the test questions come from. Try the free chapter 4 questions.