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We Had 3 Assumptions About Life in the UK. All Wrong.

How Great Is Britain

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We had three assumptions about life in the UK before we moved here.

We were wrong about every single one.

In this episode, we go through the specific things we got completely wrong before moving to England — from assuming there just wasn't enough room to build bigger houses, to thinking travel between places would be faster on a smaller island, and assuming a shared language meant a shared culture.

…wait, Gemma has noticed a difference between the North and South of England?

Turns out, moving to another country has a funny way of showing you just how much you thought you understood before you got here.

As featured on BBC Points West, we’re a British-American couple sharing our experience of leaving the USA and moving to the UK with our two little girls and two rescue pups while celebrating everyday British life.

Download our US → UK relocation checklist:
https://howgreatisbritain.com/resources

Products that helped:
https://howgreatisbritain.com/recomme...

Website: www.HowGreatisBritain.com
Follow us:Instagram: @howgreatisbritain.gb
TikTok: @howgreatisbritain

Editing and Cool Animations - Dave Weisser (@daveweisser)

End Music - "Lemonade Stand" by alanajordanhttps://pixabay.com/music/cartoons-le...

00:00 – What We Thought Life in the UK Would Be Like
01:28 – Why Are UK Houses So Small?
04:06 – Why We Stopped Buying So Much Stuff
07:49 – Driving in the UK: Miles vs Minutes
09:19 – Commuting to London: How Far Is Too Far?
12:10 – Same Language, Completely Different Culture
16:13 – Making Friends & Finding Community
18:43 – We Were Wrong About British Weather
21:14 – Final Thoughts On Life in the UK

First Day of School: We Realised What We No longer Had to Carry - First Day of School: We Realised What We N...

We Had the Same Procedure, but 60x THE COST! - We Had the Same Procedure, BUT 60x THE COST!5

Things This American Learned After One Year Living in the UK - 5 Things This American Learned After One Y...

#britishculture #culturalshocks #howgreatisbritain #AmericanInEngland #BritishVsAmerican #MovingToTheUK

20 Comments

@roderickmoore3113 11 days ago Pinned

This underlined Mark Twain's comment when he said the difference between America and England is that the English think a 100 miles is a long way, and the Americans think a 100 years is a long time.

@gillianas1177 8 days ago

Gemma may remember Alastair Cooke's "Letter from America" on the radio in her childhood. (The series ran from 1946-2004, nearly sixty years.) I remember him commenting in one of his episodes that when he went to America he assumed it would just be Britain "writ large". He said it wasn't. It was a foreign country!

@markfour2841 11 days ago

Semi-detached housing is responsible planning to conserve space and prevent urban sprawl which, in turn helps to keep towns walkable and makes public transport more accessible.

@bethel1019 10 days ago

In general, the south of England is much warmer than the north. I grew up in Cumbria but lived in Bath for nearly 20 years of my adult life. Every time I came home to visit my parents I would pack extra jumpers and waterproofs. I travelled by train and when I got out to change trains at Lancaster it would usually be windy and colder and I'd have to put a jacket on. Then the heat would hit me when I got back to Bath.

@pamelsims2068 6 days ago

Semi detached houses and terraced houses sharing a wall ...particularly with the chimney breasts in that wall dies three main things.
1. Occupies a smaller footprint on the land as ....no space between the houses.more houses built on the available space.
2. Less materials keeps the price down,,... a bit as well as saving the environment ( relatively new concept.)
3. Houses retain more heat.

@operationfish 11 days ago

This is just a reality check for you. When I was a lad in the 50's the population of the UK was around 50 million ; it's now approaching 70 million. Regarding flora and fauna, percentages do vary, but we have lost between 50 to 80 percent of species in just eighty years.. We are cramped together in smaller accommodation, but as human beings we need the protected green spaces to maintain our sanity, and to encourage species to flourish in a healthy environment. Those green spaces should never be built on. We are reaching the maximum total population sustainable on our small island !

@katejackson7432 11 days ago

USA is also finite and now they are learning that with the water

@PiersDJackson 18 hours ago

Semi- detached is roughly a synonym of "Duplex". If you consider the three forms of lateral housing styles - freestanding (one in the middle of the land) and the terrace at the other (sharing both side walls); and in-between is the semi-detached (one side attached to the house nexr door, other three sides open).

The reasoning is it conserves resources, if you put your fireplaces along that shared wall, each house benefits from the other.

@colinbirks5403 10 days ago

As a Brit, who's travelled, there were times, I would have given my right arm, for an English Spring morning. Permanent sun is debilitating.

@michael7286 11 days ago

Always have a nice big warm winter coat at the ready as it gets nearer the wintertime. The weather can change completely from one week to the next week.
The last couple of winters have been relatively tame and mild so we are due a winter that is a lot colder and wetter, that's how it goes over here in the UK.
As the motto says - Be Prepared.

@simonspeechley2859 10 days ago

When everyone in America drives on the wrong side of the road it is a little awkward to insist on driving on the correct side.

@alanboucek 9 days ago

my childhood home in Philadelphia was a twin- ie semi-detached. I think that the scale difference in UK spaces/buildings is a result of much of the US being built around the automobile- even modern british spaces are usually pedestrian first

@TomCapes 11 days ago

I must admit, I really REALLY wish the weather nowadays was like you imagined it was going to be. I live in Grimsby with the advantage of sea breezes off the famously ferocious North Sea and still thought last summer was hideous.
It's definitely different from "the olden days", but it very probably won't end well for any of us...

@carlybishop6160 9 days ago

I completely understand the whole learning to be an adult elsewhere part. I left Uni and a year of basically summer camps I moved to Portugal for 5 years. I came back to the UK at the age of 28 and I realised I had no idea how to be an adult. I remember trying to explain to the guy on the Council tax helpline how I could be 28 with 0 idea how council tax worked. I could explain how taxes, bills, etc, worked in Portugal but it was starting from the very beginning for the UK.

@birdie1585 11 days ago

Green belt is a specific thing. In fact it isn't really possible to build anything on the huge majority of land in the UK.
To build anything outside of an existing town etc., that land has usually been ear-marked for deveopment as part of the local "plan". In the case of the expansion of any existing town/village/whatever, the local plan will include the basic details of what will be built and only the major national house-builders will be involved.
If anyone wants a home with a huge garden (normal development rates are around 8 homes per acre and an acre is ROUGHLY 70 yards sqare), they will have to buy it as something built, probably, pre 1960's, possibly as a converted agricultural building. They may or may not get permission to replace the house or extend it.
There are exceptions, but they are specific and few and far between.

@gennytun 10 days ago

Your third point resonates. I've not visited the US, but have been a couple of times to Canada, and I experienced it as so much more 'foreign' and unfamiliar than I had anticipated. I was used to visiting non English-speaking counties where expected everything to be different, but unconsciously my brain expected Canada to be familiar because the language was the same, so I kept being surprised by differences large and small: eg, from the light switches and the traffic lights to the restrictions on where you can buy alcohol...

@wayneprewett6114 7 days ago

Bristol to Yeovil is 26 miles and can take anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half together there.

@simon-t-nicholls 10 days ago

When we first bought our house in Florida (Poinciana) in 2009, we were 45 minutes from Orlando Airport (for example) , but our subdivision was surrounded by orange groves for miles around....when we sold up in 2022, that journey had become 2 hours.....2hrs of nose to nose stop start traffic...that's because all those orange groves are now developed- but only one new "toll"road was built!

@praeliora 10 days ago

The closer you live to London, the higher your costs.. most people use public transport to commute. Living on the M1 corridor meets pretty much every other motorway, and can help you reach a lower cost of living without losing ease of access.

@Luvisenergy 11 days ago (edited)

I have seen a real classic semi detached 1930s style architecture original blue print... Gussed when... 1880s!!!! So basically the houses were designed 5 decades ago but didn't start building until the 1920s to 1930s