An Incomplete Yet Somewhat Sufficient Guide to Writing Fiction Based in the UK
As many of you know, I am an American who lives and studies in London. I thought I’d make a little general rules list about aspects of UK culture which I feel are misrepresented quite often when I read fiction written by someone who’s never experienced life here. So here it goes, every American fiction writers’ incomplete yet somewhat sufficient guide to writing fiction based in the UK.
KNOW YOUR SUPERMARKETS. Tesco isn’t the only one. Tesco and Sainsbury’s are the two most popular, like Safeway, Albertson’s, or Kroger. M&S and Waitrose are where the posh white people shop. Everything is over-priced; the American equivalent would be Whole Foods (which the UK has but is not nearly as common). Then there’s Morrison’s and Co-Op which are both good but not as popular as Tesco or Sainsbury’s. And then you have the discount supermarkets like Lidl and Aldi, where everything is off-branded so the prices are lower. And of course there’s ASDA which is Wal-Mart only smaller and not as terrifying.
In the UK, pants = underwear. I thought this would be quite known but I still see the mistake all the time? Jeans and trousers, folks!
Accents are hugely different from one another. First you have to learn the distinction between Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, and English. Then from there you have all the regional accents. And accents are classed and racialised as well. A middle class white person raised in West London is going to have a completely different accent from a working class PoC raised in East London, even though they may live within 15 miles of each other. If you want to really impress readers, study different types of accents and incorporate them into your dialogue, it makes things much more interesting (think Hagrid from Harry Potter).
Pubs are also classed. There are old white working class pubs that don’t do food (besides maybe crisp packets), are always showing greyhound or horse racing, and still smell of cigarette smoke. Only locals go here, and they usually go pretty much every night. Like the Winchester from Shaun of the Dead. And then you have the hipster pubs, which are expensive and do fancy food. The people working at these pubs usually look pretty cool—dyed hair, piercings, that stuff—but there probably aren’t any ‘regulars’ who come there every day.
Wetherspoon’s is the backbone of society. Wetherspoon’s (or Spoons) is a chain pub that’s pretty much in every damn post code. It’s cheap as shit and beloved by many. You can get a huge cocktail pitcher for under £10, and you can guarantee you’ll get wasted pretty quickly cause they’re full of sugar and have a high alcohol content.
Drinking culture in general is quite different from the US. People start drinking at about age 15/16, and it’s legal to drink at 18. Kids drink WKD (which is like Mike’s Hard Lemonade I think??? I’ve never actually had it but it seems like it’s on the same tier), Smirnoff Ice, Malibu, and cheap fruity wine (Echo Falls, Hardy’s, Blossom Hill, Kumala, and Gallo Family are the usual brands).
Drunk food consists of: fried chicken, chips (+cheese, salt and vinegar, gravy, or curry, depending on the region), kebabs, pizza from a shop with bad graphic design, microwaveable burgers. You can also get delivery from a lot of restaurants, and they bring it right to your house. Indian, pizza, and Chinese are the most common.
Speaking of food, it’s hard to find good Mexican food in the UK. There’s Wahaca but it’s spendy as it’s a sit-down restaurant and it kind of only exists in touristy and gentrified areas. You won’t have any luck finding cheap, authentic street tacos the way you would in Southern California. There also isn’t really any fast food Mexican (although there are a handful of Taco Bells splattered around the country). I’m sure there are some trendy areas which are bringing in Mexican street food in London, but let’s be real, it’s probably not authentic and is also probably stupidly over-priced. I’m getting off topic, sorry.
Nando’s is also the backbone of society. They do grilled chicken there, ranging from mild (but still seasoned) to burn your tonsils off spicy. There’s stuff for vegetarians too, like portobello mushroom and halloumi (a type of cheese you grill—it’s amazing and difficult to find in the US without spending an obscene amount of money) wraps which are incredible. Nando’s is usually packed and they play really fun Spanish/Portuguese/South African music which is really fun when you’re drunk and in the toilets. 10/10, perfect for a cheeky night out with the lads. The kind of place Gryffindors probably love (I’m sorry I keep using Harry Potter references)
You don’t ‘sign for the check’ in the UK. Almost every credit/debit card in the UK has a chip, and you put it in the chip and pin machine, type in your pin, and voila! You’ve paid! It’s actually much more secure than signing, honestly, the amount of times I’ve just scribbled my signature in a US shop and they’ve accepted it without even checking is appalling.
Public transport is actually good in most cities. Buses are common everywhere, and bigger cities like Manchester, London, Birmingham, Glasgow, etc all have some sort of mass rail system, whether that’s a subway, tram, lightrail, whatever. Also nearly everywhere (even the tiny villages!) at least has a train station. It may be tiny as shit and trains may not go through very often, but they do exist.
All schools have uniforms.
Infant school = preschool, primary school = elementary school, secondary school = middle school/half of high school, further education (6th Form) = second half of high school, uni = college. The first two and last one are pretty self explanatory. At 16, you take your GCSEs, and after that, you’re not required to continue school, but many go to further education and take A Levels, which are like the pre-requisite for uni (although you can get into uni without A Levels, this is quite rare). Most take 2-3 subjects for A-Levels, but I think you can take more if you have a death wish (kind of like AP classes for us Americans). Here’s a good link for people who want to know more about the UK education system: https://www.internationalstudent.com/study_uk/education_system/
No one says “What’s up?” Instead, it’s “Alright?” which is confusing at first, but you get used to it. An example greeting between two friends: ‘Hey mate, alright?’ ‘Yeah, you alright?’ And that’s it.
Religion is different. I actually know very little about religion so I can’t offer a whole lot of insight on this, but I’ve had a lot of people tell me it’s very different. If anyone wants to have their input here, that would be lovely!
Houses don’t have yards, they have gardens. This is mostly just a terminology thing to be honest.
Speaking of terminology, use ‘pavement’ instead of ‘sidewalk’. Obviously people aren’t stupid, they’ll know what you mean if you say sidewalk, but still, gotta stay authentic for the plot.
House layouts in general are very different. Houses are either terraced (town houses in the US), semi-detached (duplex in the US), or detached (typical US house). Terraced are most common in big cities, and most houses are made of brick. Take some time to research different architecture styles (Victorian, Edwardian, Georgian, 60s), the differences between them become quite apparent when you do a bit of looking.
There are also a variety of apartment/flat styles. Old period properties are often divided up into flats, and there are also purpose-built blocks of flats, which is like a US apartment complex. There are also luxury flats, which I think we call condominiums in the US. They’re all really modern and have lots of glass.
Since the entire country is so damn tiny, long roadtrips aren’t really a thing. It’s more like, you drive somewhere to go camping, like Cornwall or Devon (basically Florida for British people).
Holidays to warm places are quite common. South of France, Greece, Portugal, and Spain and some of the usual destinations. You usually fly to these places on budget flights like Easy Jet or Ryan Air, unless you’re rich, then you probably take British Airways.
Stop signs don’t exist. No, I’m serious. If the intersection (or crossroads) is big enough, there’ll be traffic lights or a roundabout. But other than that, you just have to be careful. Which is generally okay, because people in the UK can actually drive.
No one refers to a section of street as a block. Cities in the UK aren’t really set up in a grid the way US cities are. Streets are kind of weird and curvy and don’t make sense, so saying ‘it’s two blocks that way!’ doesn’t really work. Instead, write about distance in terms of vague relation: ‘It’s just up that road a bit, past the M&S, then left at the The King’s Head pub’.
London, in general, is a fucking huge city. You can’t walk across the whole thing in a day. Hell, you can barely drive across the whole thing in a day. Big Ben and Tower Bridge are 2.5 miles apart from each other. I know, it was a shocker for me too when I first got here! Take a look at a map of London and you’ll see what I mean. It is possible to do most of Westminster in a day, but that would be a very full day and you wouldn’t get to really see anything in-depth. And most people live very far away from these landmarks. So keep that in mind next time you have a character who lives in London saying they can hear Big Ben chime from their flat. That character must have a lot of money.
This is a really short list and I’ve probably barely even made a DENT so if anyone else has something to add, please do so! And please reblog this to boost it to your followers! Thank you my pals, have a good day, and KEEP WRITING!
- The drinking in a fic is how I tend to know if the author is a Brit (or Irish/European) or not.
- Cards nowadays are mostly contactless and don’t even need you to enter a pin if the amount is under 25 quid. Also, keep in mind that if you’re writing fic set in late 90s-early 00s, then signing the receipt was what we did back then when paying by card.
- The ‘alright’ confused me so much when I first moved to the UK. I kept worrying I looked ill.
- Houses in the south tend to be painted in bright colours (well, at least Brighton and Portsmouth where I lived). Midlands and North it’s mostly brick. Living in a detached house means you earn good money. Semi-detached is usually affordable by a couple with two decent salaries.
- Accents are everything. They reveal where you were raised as well as your class. People will comment on or otherwise make note of your accent. In the first episode of Misfits, the very first thing the characters do when they meet each other is to talk/take the piss off the others’ accent.
- There’s a twitter account which tweets things overheard in Waitrose.
This is incredibly helpful to this American girl that can only dream of an English immersion.
I’m guilty of just throwing a Tesco in there. LOL.
Okay, I have a funny story which, if you’ve been around a bit, you may already know. So, I’m not sure who first started the ‘denims’ craze a few years ago, and in all honesty it might have been me??? Anyway, for whatever reason I/other people thought that Brits called ‘jeans’ ‘denims’ and started calling jeans denims in everything we wrote. Well, some Brit writers (birdsofshore was one of them and could corroborate this if she were on tumblr) saw it and thought, “Oh, I guess Americans call ‘jeans’ ‘denims’. So that they understand, I’d better call them that too,” and then up and started writing denims as well, further feeding into the idea that denims was indeed correct! When in actuality WE ALL SAY JEANS. So in HP fandom in particular, around 2012-2014-ish, there will be a shitload of fics by several people, even some Brit writers, calling jeans denims for really no good reason. If you’re new to HP fandom and reading a lot in that era, just know: We were all wrong and have since stopped the denims madness. Sorry about that. ;P LOL!
The last bit there is linguistic gold. Somehow British fanfic writers became confused enough by American fanfic writers (writing fic set in Britain) to start regularly using a word that Brits never actually use. I’m dying.
(But I thought it was your word! But I thought it was yours!)
The education system has changed since this was written - after GCSEs, you’re required to stay in fulltime education until you’re eighteen, but you can do an apprenticeship for this.
GCSEs are run on the 9-1 system, which no one really understands yet. I’ve had people tell me they hope I get a 1, which would be the worst possible marks. If you get a 3 or lower in maths and English, you have to resit the exam. There are rumours of a 10 being possible within 5 years and everyone hates that. I’m taking 11, but I have friends doing 9 and friends doing 13.
9=A**
8=A*
7=A
6=B
5=C
4=D
Also, my school expects 4 A levels (3 if you have a really good reason, usually only offered to people who did their GCSEs there; 5 if one of them’s PE or EPQ) so it’s getting more difficult.
I live in Northern Ireland and want to point out the differences in schools. In N.I. we have Grammar schools and a test for 10/11 year-olds. My school needed a minimum 95 points out of a total (I think) 132 points to get in.
Schools in England use regions. So if you live just outside the good school’s territory, then you can’t go it to. Many people in England buy apartments that they don’t use, just to get their kids to go to the good schools. (it’s quite a big issue actually). And they don’t have grammar schools.
If your characters have different accents, they mightn’t understand each other. When I talk to people with a strong Belfast accent, I have no clue what they’re saying. And we’re from the same country.
You can say footpath instead of pavement. I don’t think anyone said this: One pound = a quid. 10 pound note is a tenner, 5 pound note is a fiver but a 20 pound note is not a twenty-er. Pretty much everyone says banter (i.e a good time) “It was great banter”. in N.I. we also say craic (said like crack) which means the pretty much the same thing, but you can also say “What’s the craic?” to mean, “What’s up?”
If you’re writing parents talking to their kids about exams, the kids will say “A-Levels” the parent will call them “O-Levels” because the system changed.
My school only let people with 20(ish) points at GCSE do four A-levels and you needs 12 points to get back in at A-Level. To get back for the second year we needed at least 3 Cs.
In reference to OP’s school names, I have never heard anyone say fucking “infant school”. We say “Nursery School” or “Nursery” for short.
I can be in a different country in 3 hours by driving and 45 minutes by flying. Because everything is closer together, unless your character is travelling from the country to London, their daily commute won’t take longer than half an hour. My commute to school takes 30 minutes depending on traffic and the bus driver. Driving to London can and will take at least an hour. Maybe even longer.
We make up words. In Northern Ireland, a normal conversation could include: “Oi, where’re youse’uns going?” which translates as: “Hey where are you lot going?” Youse is plural of you and “uns” is “ones”. Idk why we put “uns” on the end, but we do. Scotland does similar stuff, but I don’t know enough about their slang.
Finally, in Britain we are “ruder”. We call each other fuckers and wankers and pricks. The Scottish are more creative and brutal than England and Wales, Northern Ireland is on par with Scotland, and Ireland is in the middle.
Oh good shout! Also slightly less relevant but to add on to the points about regional accents, usually people will have different accents from their friends or peers. This is mainly because whilst regional accents are the most distinct from each other, towns (even if they’re only like 20 miles away) also have differences in accent.
For example my school is bang in the middle of a small village town. As such a fair amount of the people there speak in what we’d deem today as ‘standard english’. However that being said, around said village is a ton of poorer, larger towns which often sound more ‘chavy’ (a common slang term for working class).
Moreover, individual schools will have their own slang attached to it so don’t be afraid to make up some slang and dot that on on top of general british slang. For example, for 5 years at secondary I went to a school in a large town - accent wise it was common to drop the ‘t’s’ and ‘g’s’ so I find myself doing that a lot and slang wise we’d have little dumb things like ‘ladies drop your weapons’ to signify a slut drop (don’t ask me why I just went along with it). Whereas at the school I’m at now that I moved to for sixth form, obviously as said before it’s in a different place so not only are the accents different (e.g out of pretty much all my friends and classes I’m often deemed to speak the most ‘chavy’) but the slang is different so if I don’t like something I find myself saying it’s ‘wack’ whereas before I’d have said ‘its peak’ or something like that.
Lastly (before this gets too long), if you’re writing about a secondary school then your characters more than likely realistically going to come from different areas and therefore have a fake rivalry with each other. Eg if we take the village my school is in for example, let’s call it W, then popular jest is that it’s posh and snobby. Whereas if we take the town I live in ® then it’s often said that it’s full of druggies and crime. That’s not to say it is of course, there’s this other town that everyone claims is inbreed and obvs isn’t but that rivalry is still there. So to add to realism I’d recommend either world building the towns around your characters or learning the views put on the towns. :)
All of this but with a few corrections: in England we DO have grammar schools, they’re just very rare and pretty much confined to a small region in Southeast England.
Also, when a British person talks about “Asians” (or British Asians), they mean people of South Asian descent (i.e. Indians, Pakistanis, etc), rather than East Asian descent like in the US and Australia. South Asians are the largest ethnic minority in Britain (5% of the UK’s population), whereas East Asians are incredibly rare over here (and tend to refer to themselves as “British Chinese” – there are even fewer people of Japanese or Korean descent here than there are (Hong Kong) Chinese, who make up 0.5% of the population).
The acronym “BAME” gets used for non-white people over here, and stands for “Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic”, where “Asian” means South Asian, and “Minority Ethnic” includes all other minority ethnicities – such as Chinese, Turkish, Middle Eastern, etc. Hispanic/Mexican/Latino people are so rare it’s unlikely you’ll meet any, even in the big cities.
And yes, we are ruder. Like the Australians, it’s not unheard of to call someone a “cunt” in a joking way (although it’s usually used as an insult, and is not a gendered slur over here like it is in the US).
London is very very racially diverse, but outside of the cities, the UK really isn’t. My husband grew up in a part of the English countryside that’s like 99% white (probably even 100% white). Whenever we visit, I am literally the only brown face there.
Also, I feel like gay culture in London is quite different to what Tumblr often portrays LGBT culture as? Homophobia still exists, like it does everywhere, but in my experience, many gay and lesbian people in London are quite openly gay/lesbian – whether that’s out and about or at work or whatever.
Foreign holidays are reasonably common. The vast majority of Brits will have been abroad (i.e. outside the UK) at least once in their lives, even if it’s just to Europe (and in Britain, we think of “Europe” as the mainland part of the continent where they don’t speak English as a first language. Americans tend to refer to Brits as “Europeans”, but we generally don’t tend to see ourselves as Europeans ourselves… although the Brexit vote in 2016 changed some of that in some people’s minds).
Also, social class is much, much, much more a thing over here than it is in many other (every other?) countries in the world. Social class in Britain is not just about wealth and aristocracy – although it used to be – but social class markers that people will pick up on (and immediately use to figure out which social class you belong to) will include your accent, what type of school you went to, what kind of food you eat, what kind of leisure hobbies you have, even down to how you dress. And yes, this even applies – to some extent – to those of us who are non-white or have immigrant parents.
