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Its masterpieces include artworks from Botticelli, Titian, Raphael, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Cezanne, Hogarth, and Gainsborough. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

You can’t miss in Britain 

I Blackpool Pleasure Beach

 It is the most visited amusement park in the United Kingdom, and one of the top twenty most-visited amusement parks in the world with 6.5 million visitors in 2010

It The major attractions at Pleasure Beach, Blackpool include:

* Pepsi Max Big One: The UK's tallest roller coaster, built by Arrow Dynamics.

* Infusion: A Vekoma Suspended Looping Coaster and the worlds first constructed entirely over water.

* Irn Bru Revolution: Europe's first fully inverting roller coaster.

* Grand National: A twin tracked racing wooden roller coaster, opened in 1935

* Valhalla: The worlds most expensive dark ride

* Wild Mouse: One of only three remaining wooden Wild Mouse roller coasters

The park is owned, directed, managed and produced by the Thompson family. In 2003 the park opened the Big Blue Hotel, a four star hotel, making the park part of an official resort.

II  Tate Modern

Tate Modern is a modern art gallery located in London, England. It is Britain's national gallery of international modern art .It is the most-visited modern art gallery in the world, with around 4.7 million visitors per year.

Tate Gallery - Museum of Art in London, the world's largest collection of English art of the XVI-XX centuries. Was founded by industrialist Sir Henry Tate. Opened on 21 July 1897. The basis of collection was a private collection of founder. According to the guide to the gallery in 1897, the beginning of the collection of Sir Henry Tate put three pictures, one of which - "Thursday" WJ Sadler

III St. Paul's Cathedral

St. Paul's Cathedral- Cathedral in London, the residence of the Bishop of London. Located on a hill Ludgate. Stories Famous Five St Paul's Cathedral, which existed at different times, but were in the same place.  Under the dome of the Cathedral there are three galleries:  the inner whispering  gallery and exterior stone and golden gallery. Whispering gallery owes its name because the architectors make some mistakes when they made this gallery: the word even spoken in a whisper, at one end of the gallery, repeatedly reflected its walls, resulting in a whisper  that could easily hear the person on the other end of the gallery.

In the belfries of Cathedral there are 17 bells, 13 of them - in the north-west tower, and 4 (including the bell Great Paul) and Great Tom) - in the south-west tower.

St. Paul's Cathedral is the burial place of almost two most famous British citizens. The first honor of being buried in the Cathedral of St. Paul to the architect - Christopher Vren. On his tomb there  is not a monument, and only shows an epitaph in Latin, "Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice" ("Reader, if you seek a monument - just look around"). Among the most prominent figures at rest in the Cathedral of St. Paul, it should be noted by Sir Isaac Newton, the Duke of Wellington, Admiral Nelson, Sir Winston Churchill and Sir Alexander Fleming.(In the film Angels and Demons was some information about this)

I think It's very interesting to visit this Cathedral

VI London Eye.

Also there is a top-list,  which includes a variety of attractions: from historic monuments to the zoo.

But now I'd like to tell you about  one building, which interested me so much. It is London Eye.

What is that? London Eye (born London Eye) - one of the largest Ferris wheel in the world, located in the London,  which is situated on Lambeth on the south bank of the Thames.

From a height of 135 meters (about 45 floors) overlooking almost the entire city. Ferris wheel - designed by architects David Marks and Julia Barfield, who won the contest project buildings in honor of the new millennium. Implementation of the project in life has taken six years.

The London Eye has 32 fully enclosed and air-conditioned cabins capsules for passengers, made in the form of eggs. Capsules represent a 32 suburban  of  London. Each 10-ton capsule may take up to 25 passengers. The wheel rotates at a constant speed of 26 centimeters per second (about 0.9 kilometers per hour) to one revolution takes about 30 minutes. 
 
 
 
 

Gardening

mound - насыпь

knot garden - a very formal design of garden in a square frame and grown with a variety or aromatic plants and culinary herbs

herbaceous border –  цветочный бордюр

manor house – помещичий дом

box – самшит

parterre – цветник

trellis - шпалера 

The English garden, also called English landscape park is a style of Landscape garden which emerged in England in the early 18th century, and spread across Europe, replacing the more formal, symmetrical French Garden of the 17th century as the principal gardening style of Europe. The English garden presented an idealized view of nature. It usually included a lake, sweeps of gently rolling lawns set against groves of trees, and recreations of classical temples, Gothic ruins, bridges, and other picturesque architecture, designed to recreate an idyllic pastoral landscape.  

Garden styles at a glance:

Roman Britain: formal, low hedges

Medieval: small enclosed, with turf seats and mounds

Tudor: knot gardens, enclosed in hedges or walls

Stuart: formal Italianate and French styles

Georgian: informal, landscaped, open parkland

Victorian: bedding plants, colourful, public gardens

20th C: mixed styles, herbaceous borders 

The earliest English gardens that we know of were planted by the Roman conquerors of Britain in the 1st century AD. It is  carefully symmetrical formal planting of low box hedges.We know very little about the gardens of Anglo-Saxon England, which is another way of saying that the warlike Anglo-Saxons did not hold gardening to be important. 

It was not until the Middle Ages that gardens once more became important in British life. There appeared little gardens in the monasteries.

Castles sometimes made room for small courtyard gardens, with paths through raised flower beds. Other common features of medieval castle gardens include turf seats and high mounds, or mounts, which provided a view over the castle walls. As castles gave way to fortified manor houses in the later medieval period, the garden became a simple green space surrounded by hedges or fences.  

The Tudors followed Italian influence in creating gardens which mirrored the alignment of the house, creating a harmony of line and proportion that had been missing in the Medieval period. For the first time since the Romans left, sundials and statues were once more popular garden ornaments. 

Stuarts were slaves to the French fashion for formal gardens. The chief feature of this French style are a broad avenue sweeping away from the house, flanked by rectangular parterres made of rigidly formal low hedges. The prime survivors of this style can be seen at Blickling Hall (Norfolk), Melbourne (Derbyshire) and Chatsworth. 

The 18th century saw a swing from Renaissance formality to a more "natural" look. Lines were no longer straight, paths curve and wander, and parterres are replaced by grass. Trees were planted in clusters rather than in straight lines, and rounded lakes replaced the rectangular ponds of the earlier style. The garden became open, a park joining the house to the outside world rather than a carefully nurtured refuge from it. 

In the Victorian era  massed beds of flowers (bedding out plants raised in greenhouses) of exotic colours appeared. Some of the finest Victorian gardens are public parks, like People's Park in Halifax. 

Gertrude Jekyll is arguably the most influential gardener of 20th century England. She popularized the herbaceous border and planning a garden based on colour schemes. Jekyll saw the house and garden as part of an integral whole, rather than the garden as an afterthought to the building. Her work survives at Marsh Court (Hampshire) and Hestercombe (Somerset). 

Gardening has always been a matter of personal taste, and often the outstanding works of previous generations are torn down to make way for the style of the next. For that reason it is hard to find unaltered examples of historical gardens in England. 

Yet, throughout Britain there are gardens great and small, formal and informal, private and public, that illustrate the British passion for creating green, growing spaces of their own. All are different, and all, like their owners and creators, have a distinct personality. 

English gardens spread all over the continent. In Russia one of the best the examples of “wild” park is Pavlovsk, the summer residence or the emperor Paul I.  

To sum up. Characteristics of the English Garden 

The European "English garden" is characteristically on a smaller scale and more filled with "eye-catchers" than most English landscape gardens: grottoes, temples, tea-houses, belvederes, pavilions, sham ruins, bridges and statues, though the main ingredients of the landscape gardens in England are sweeps of gently rolling ground and water, against a woodland background with clumps of trees and outlier groves. The name— not used in the United Kingdom, where "landscape garden" serves— differentiates it from the formal baroque design of the Garden à la française.  

The canonical European English park contains a number of Romantic elements. Always present is a pond or small lake with a pier or bridge. Overlooking the pond is a round or hexagonal pavilion, often in the shape of a monopteros, a Roman temple. Sometimes the park also has a "Chinese" pavilion. Other elements include a grotto and imitation ruins. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Sports in Great Britain   

National sports in Great Britain... It is a very interesting question, because many kinds of sport have taken the origin in England.

       The Englishmen love sports, they are called sports-lovers in spite of the fact that some of them neither play games nor even watch them. They only like to speak about sports.

       Some kinds of sport are professional in England.

Many traditional sporting contests take place in England, for example, cricket. This game is associated with England. There are many cricket clubs in this country. English people like to play cricket. They think that summer without cricket isn't summer. If you want to play cricket you must wear white boots, a white shirt and white long trousers. There are two teams. Each team has eleven players. Cricket is popular in boys' schools. Girls play cricket too. 

Football has got a long history. Football was played by the whole village teams in the middle ages in England. Now football is the most popular game in Britain. It is a team game. There are some amateur teams but most of the teams are professional ones in England. Professional football is a big business. Football is played at schools too. In rugby football you can see a ball, but it is not round. It is oval. This is a team game. There are fifteen players in each team. It is a popular game in England. There are many amateur rug-by football teams in this country. 

Wimbledon is the centre of lawn tennis. Some years ago Wimbledon was a village, now it is a part of London. The most important tennis competition takes place there every summer.

There are some racing competitions in England. They are motor-car racing, dog-racing, donkey-racing, boat-racing, horse-racing. All kinds of racings are popular in England. It is interesting to see the egg-and-spoon race. The runner, who takes part in this competition, must carry an egg in a spoon. It is not allowed to drop the egg. 

The boxing match has impacted the English language with phrases like "throwing in the towel", "hitting below the belt" and "punching above one's weight". The sport has also inspired a number of British writers, including George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Conan Doyle. (One sportswriter, knocked out by his own metaphors, described an unfortunate British heavyweight as the owner of "a glass jaw" who “fell in a straight, pure Doric line, like a tree crashing in the forest”.) It's an exciting sport, but not for everybody.

Golf in its early days in Scotland may well have had two distinct forms. One was a ‘short’ game similar to ‘kolf’ played in the Netherlands. From this developed ‘links golf’, played with a variety of clubs to holes, marked by flags, the fore runner of the game today.

Bobsleigh, was surprisingly invented by the English group of holidaymakers in Switzerland in 1890, wanted to create a sled that could carry people down the snow-covered road between St Moritz and Celerina. The sport started as a leisure activity for the rich young daredevils of Europe who gathered for fun on the alpine slopes. It was added to the Winter Olympics as a four-man event at the Winter Olympics in Chamonix 1924 and two-man later at Lake Placid in 1932.

The game of curling was invented in late medieval Scotland, as evidenced by a curling stone inscribed with the date 1511, uncovered along with another bearing the date 1551, when an old pond was drained at Dunblane, Scotland. The first written reference to a contest using stones on ice coming from the records of Paisley Abbey, Renfrew, in February 1541. One of the national games of Scotland, it has spread to many countries.

Darts began in Medieval England and is probably a spinoff of archery. Played started on ships where room was restricted, by shortening arrows and throwing them at the bottom of an empty wine barrel. Henry VIII enjoyed the game immensely. So much so, that he was given a beautifully ornate set by Anne Boleyn. The game remained popular throughout the British Empire but it wasn't until somewhere around 1900 that the rules and darts began to look like the game we play today.  

Inventions and inventors

Joseph Swan was the British chemist and physicist responsible for the invention of the light bulb.  

Alexander Graham Bell - invention of the first working telephone. Bell moved to the US in 1871, where he developed his interests in sign language and transmitting speech (both his mother and wife were deaf).  

Sir Alexander Fleming was a Scottish biologist and pharmacologist discovered    the antibiotic substance penicillin for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945. 

John Logie Baird was a Scottish engineer, most famous for being the first person to demonstrate a fully working television. He was the father of the modern day goggle-box. Baird managed to achieve his first crude transmissions as early as 1924. You can still see Baird's original television and his experimental apparatus at Bradford's National Media Museum. 
 

Ian Wilmut is an eminent English embryologist, best known as the leader of the Scottish research group that cloned Dolly the sheep back in 1996. Dolly was the first mammal to be successfully cloned from an adult cell, as opposed to an embryo cell. It was one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century. 

Michael Aldrich is the English inventor and entrepreneur who was first to develop the idea of pre-internet online shopping or e-commerce, designing systems that allowed for online transactions between businesses and their customers as early as 1979.  

Tim Berners-Lee

Berners-Lee is the British computer scientist and MIT professor who invented the World Wide Web.

X-ray computed tomography (CT) Digital geometry processing is used to generate a three-dimensional image of the inside of an object from a large series of two-dimensional X-ray images taken around a single axis of rotation.

A crossword is a word puzzle that normally takes the form of a square or rectangular grid of white and shaded squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases, by solving clues which lead to the answers. Crossword puzzles became a regular weekly feature in the World, and spread to other newspapers; the Boston Globe, for example was publishing them at least as early as 1917.

A tin can, tin (especially in British English), steel can, or a can, is an air-tight container for the distribution or storage of goods, composed of thin metal, and requiring cutting or tearing of the metal as the means of opening. The tin can was patented in 1810 by the English inventor Peter Durand, based on experimental work by the Frenchman Nicolas Appert. He did not produce any food cans himself, but sold his patent to two other Englishmen, Bryan Donkin and John Hall, who set up a commercial canning factory, and by 1813 were producing their first canned goods for the British Army.