Historic · Creative · Proud
England is a country. Its capital city is London, with other major cities including Manchester and Birmingham. With a population of approximately 56.5M, the main language spoken is English.
England codified association football in 1863 when the Football Association drew up the Laws of the Game at the Freemasons' Tavern in London — creating the template for a sport now played by 265 million people across 200 nations.
London serves as the political, cultural and economic heart of England. As the seat of government and often the most populous city, it concentrates the country's main institutions, universities and cultural landmarks. Beyond the capital, major cities include Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds — each a hub of regional culture, economy and history. London is the world's most visited city and a financial, cultural, and linguistic capital of planetary scale — the Thames threading through 2,000 years of settlement from Roman Londinium, past the Norman Tower and medieval Westminster, to Canary Wharf's glass towers that transformed a derelict dockland in a single generation.
With a population of approximately 56.5M, England is a vibrant society with a rich mix of traditions and communities. The official language is English, which reflects the country's cultural heritage and connects it with a wide international community. The English invented the Industrial Revolution, association football, the World Wide Web, the railway network, and parliamentary democracy — then exported all of them, creating a paradox where the most globally influential culture is also among the most self-deprecating about its own achievements.
The emblematic dish of England is Sunday Roast. The Sunday roast — a joint of beef, pork, or lamb with roasted potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, seasonal vegetables, and gravy — functions less as a meal than as a weekly social ritual that structures English domestic life, its preparation the informal measure of culinary competence in any English household.
Football holds a special place in the heart of England's national identity. Football in England is not merely sport but infrastructure — 92 professional clubs across four divisions, matches every weekend from August to May in every city and market town, with the Premier League commanding a global television audience that makes it the most-watched sports league on Earth.
The highest point in England is Scafell Pike, rising to 978 metres above sea level. The Lake District's glacially carved valleys — Windermere, Ullswater, Derwentwater — inspired the Romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge to articulate a new relationship between humans and landscape, producing writing that shaped how the Western world thinks about wilderness and the moral weight of natural beauty.