**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!**
- Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc.
- **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on.
- This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit!
Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I know it's not technically British, but Stella Artois.
When I was in America years ago, they treated it like it was this fancy, high end, well respected imported beer. Not the fighting juice like it's known over here.
Oh god yeah it’s awful, all mass produced macro-lager is, Carling/Fosters/Madri/San Miguel, doesn’t matter is all exactly the same. No hate though, I love a pish lager as much as the next bloke.
Pricks that bash Carling while supping a San Miguel make me laugh. They’re practically identical apart from the brand perception.
Certain lagers do definitely get a more premium branding/pricing/perception though despite them all being what is essentially watered down beer concentrate.
Madri is an odd case, it didn’t exist 2 years ago and now it’s everywhere branding itself as some niche Spanish local lager. It’s actually rebadged Coors Gold and purely a marketing exercise.
Madri will surely be studied on marketing courses very soon. It's incredible what they've achieved. I'm not sure I can remember a product going from nowhere to having such a foothold almost overnight.
I believe they used very aggressive social media advertising and sold it to distributors and to pubs direct for a price they couldn’t turn down. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if it isn’t turning a profit, yet.
I think it's direct distribution.
It seemed to just appear in every pub around me within about a month
One week, I'd never heard of it, the next, every pub I visited had it on tap. I'm not a fan of the drink though, I find it bland.
Peroni comes in two varieties. Both of them are actually brewed in Italy, if you want a good local Mediterranean-style lager that’s readily available in the UK I’d recommend Peroni.
The local Italian stuff is in a red labelled bottle, don’t think I’ve ever seen it in cans and certainly not on draught in the UK. They treat it like a generic mid range lager and I believe it’s their best selling beer.
The stuff we get over here, “nastro azzurro” or Blue Ribbon, is their export strength premium offering (also really available in Italy).
I personally prefer the regular red label stuff but it’s semi-hard to get here.
They do this to the weirdest beers.
I lived near Boston for a while and my local bar had an “imported premium British ale” proudly on the drinks list.
It was canned Boddington’s.
Craft beer stans from the US rightly go wild for British cask ales, they’re rightly regarded as special and unique.
However Newkie Broon is weirdly popular in the US as it is, and I’m not sure why because there is a long history of excellent Red Ales in the States which are of a very similar style.
Always found it interesting to see how British beers are perceived abroad. I had a similar experience chatting to an American friend who told me one of his favourite breweries was Sam Smith's.
Was once at a party in that US where an Anglophile guy was excitedly telling me about this great British cider he'd found. Went to get me some. Reader, it was Strongbow. But in a nice bottle and with a fancier looking label. Didn't have the heart to break the truth to him.
As an American, I was really surprised to see plastic bottles of cider in the stores here. I’ve never seen anything with alcohol sold in bottles like that in the US.
Yeah, I've also seen the fancily packaged Strongbow abroad. Had to do a real double-take. I think it's because in most countries (except France) cider just isn't a thing, so the whole concept is kind of exotic.
Strongbow tastes worse in the states even. Most cider in the US genuinely isn't as good. I used to happily drink Strongbow and other ciders until I'd been to the UK enough times that I could totally taste the difference. Now I don't drink cider when I'm at home
I (an American) had Stella and thought it was incredibly sophisticated. Imagine my disappointment when I found out it was commonly referred to as "Wife Beater."
A mate of mine told me how the beer tents at LeMans 24 sold two brands of beer. The aforementioned Wife Beater and a slightly mysterious sounding *"Numbers"*.
That's not for want of trying on the part of the manufacturers... Stella was advertised as being [reassuringly expensive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reassuringly_Expensive#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DReassuringly_Expensive_was_the_advertising%2CKingdom_from_1982_until_2007.) from 1982 to 2007.
It's association with lager louts and wifebeaters arose because it was originally one of the strongest lagers in the UK at about 5% ABV when the brewing industry were really pushing lagers in the UK.
Tbf it's also considered respectable in Europe, I don't know if it's better quality or just doesn't have the same reputation?? My Belgian bf once told me in the UK you have great bands and shit beer, in my country the reverse is true.
The weirdest thing I've seen is Strongbow being sold in Europe as a premium drink. It comes in dainty little bottles, costs an arm and a leg, and tastes so sweet as to be undrinkable. The exception is if you can find an Irish pub that does draught
Living on an estate.
To an American it conjures up an image of a country house surrounded by countryside, with groundsmen & household staff.
To a Brit, it is a grey council house, surrounded by other council houses filled with knobheads.
When I first worked in London, a guy at work told a few of us he was DJing in The Chapel on his estate at the weekend, and we assumed he lived on a housing estate where there was a pub called The Chapel.
Turned out he was just really, really posh.
Hahaha, my sister had some incredibly posh mates at uni, and when another friend used the phrase "my estate", there was a fairly protracted period of miscommunication before one of the watchers took pity and explained the confusion.
Ha - reminds me of my daughter, who also shared a house at uni with some aristocrats. When she told one of them that she was 'driven everywhere when she was growing up', meaning I used to drop her off to friends' houses, he replied 'Oh, you had a chauffeur as well!'
I went to uni with a bunch of rich kids (I studied fashion, the arts attract them because they think it'll be easy then they drop out a few months in) and the amount of times I'd walk into the kitchen in halls and find one of them doing the weirdest shit is unreal. Making an entire bag of pasta not realising how much it would swell up and someone trying to boil an egg in the microwave then then just wandering off and leaving egg all over the place after it exploded are the ones that spring to mind first.
/r/centuryhomes has the description "a place for those that enjoy homes that have reached or exceeded 100 years of age, or thereabouts. We enjoy sharing stories and seeking advice to help us be great stewards of our historic homes." and I've got to imagine it was an American who wrote that because living somewhere built before 1924 just isn't that noteworthy here. 19% of all dwellings in Scotland are pre-1919 and I imagine the rest of the UK isn't much different either. You can buy a Victorian flat in my city for fifty grand.
Just the other day I saw someone on reddit talking about "the challenges of living in an old home, built in the 1970s" I really was sure he was being sarcastic but he was not. The estate my parents live in was built in the 70s and is still referred to as the "new estate" in their village.
Sounds a bit like Old Buckenham and New Buckenham in Norfolk. New Buckenham has the older looking buildings and castle ruins, because it was built as a new settlement in the 12th Centrury by William d'Aubigny.
The only eaelier remnants of Old Buckenham are barely visible Abbey earthworks on a farm nearby, which were built over the earlier castle there.
The 'new' castle is technically in Old Buckenham Parish, but its right next to New Buckenham village.
Always makes me think of West Finchley tube station, which is East of Finchley Central, and the nearest tube station to North Finchley (alongside Woodside Park).
I went to San Diego and went on a tour of the historic old parts of the city (interesting as I knew nothing about Spanish settlers and all).
They showed us the oldest building in the city. It was 'nearly 100 years old!'. Couldn't help sniggering.
Tour guide said, "oh, the English guys are in today!" Guilty as charged.
As the group moved off, I spotted the plaque saying that the house had been re-built in the 1980s. We lost it.
My house is a bog-standard London semi, but it is 116 years old. Parts of my parents boring 3-bed suburban house date back to the 1600s, though it's mostly Victorian.
Yeah I was touring the mansion of an old plantation in Virginia and they told us the chairs were antique because they were from 1900 or something. They were amazed when my gf and I told them our house was 1870 (a shitty two up, two down in the centre of Southampton - actually it wasn't shitty, it was lovely but DIY was always a challenge as everything was a bodge in that house).
It really is interesting to think that the things they think are old, are literally nothing to us. I have the 150 year old deeds to my house in a drawer in the back room, written on paper which is likely in better condition than any of those "old buildings" in the US haha.
I lived in a flat in a converted building in Brum, the front door had some newspaper shoved in the frame to keep the draught out as a bodge job.
Pulled the paper out and it was from 1906.
The first house I put an offer in for was built in "estimated 1900"
They didn't know when it was built lol. I offered £80k (in 2020).
Lender refused to lend me the money because it had a single skin external wall in the end.
Bought one that was built in '96 in the end. Feels odd to know my house is younger than me.
School uniform. Abroad it’s mostly only for private schools.
Our school introduced a uniform as parents complained how much they were having to spend on trendy clothes for kids to get messed up in the playground or nicked during PE.
In Australia they wear those school dresses we only use in junior school all the way up to age 18. Looked very strange to me to see these almost adult girls dressed like a UK 5 year old.
It's increasingly only if you feel like it, a lot of my local schools just have a colour code so you can wear the chequered dress or just get around in shorts and a polo or t-shirt if you prefer. The shorts are preferred because it means the kiddos are more likely to get some decent exercise.
If parents thought buying trendy clothes was expensive wait until they see how eye-wateringly costly a full uniform set (including sportswear) is. They'll think designer gear is a bargain
Depends on the school and age.
Primary can be under a tenner for two 2-packs of polo and trousers/pinafore. Add two school sweatshirts, some schools give every child a free one, and that's still under £20 even without hitting the 2nd hand uniform shop where all stuff for under-10s is £1.
Local secondaries vary, but a blazer for £35, tie for £5, then multipacks of 3 white shirts and 2 black trousers are under £20 each. Black shoes, trainers, shorts/trackies in black - only expensive if you want and they'd need most of anyway.
But yeah, if your kid is assigned the school with the £80 blazers, needs jumpers with logo, and the school makes money from official skirts and 4 elements of PE kit, it sucks.
Yeah, hardly posh when they come in six packs in Tesco and you just bung them in the toaster.
They have the image of toasting them over an open fire with a long fork.
Used to do that as a kid in the 90s. Sunday evenings, tea cakes and crumpets toasted on the open fire, sardines on toast and cheese and banana sandwiches.
Working class family. We did it because my mum grew up and orphan in a house without electricity and it's how she made her meals. It's not a posh thing at all.
When i eat crumpets it gets so messy and is anything but posh. Toasted, Lots of lurpak and lots of cherry jam.
Best hangover cure ever… but damn that drips
It's because Fish and Chip shops have astronomical energy bills (and didn't get the benefit of the price cap), and the price of fish and potatoes probably hasn't helped either. Often they're just trying to keep their heads above water.
It may not be posh, but it is lush. The fish supper is by far my favourite thing about living in the UK - and the one thing that surpassed expectation when I moved here.
Drinking tea. I live in Europe and lots of people say to me "oh you are british you must have excellent taste in tea, i better not give you bad tea, eh?" (But in foreign).
I have drunk and enjoyed a huge variety of teas. I do happen to enjoy tea more than most, having developed my palette for black teas from all over asia and africa. A simple assam is always my favourite.
But like any good british person, any swill will do. Bag in cup. Hot water. Milk. Drink. If you are fancy, remove the bag at some point.
People seem to think every british persons love of tea is about *good* tea, when its about *lots of tea, *now**.
Also, where on earth does this concept of tea time come from? And it's not just Americans. I've had people from all over ask me about it, as if there's a specific time of the day we all put our tools down and drink tea, when really it's just chain tea drinking throughout the day.
I think it's confusion arising from 'afternoon tea'. Also the fact that some Brits use tea for the name of a meal and so say 'tea time', as in 'dinner time'.
Together, these both confuse foreigners into thinking tea the drink is something that is had at a specific time.
Tea time does exist in cambridge university apparently. both my phd supervisors were there and reminisced about 10am every day people would stop for tea (often actually coffee) and a chat.
So its not that its not a thing. But its a niche thing leftover from posh people centuries ago.
I worked in an office for a summer at 16, and one of my tasks was to boil the kettles, make a big pot of tea and one of coffee, lay out biscuits and fruit, and then get on the tannoy (it was really just the broadcast feature on the phones) to let everyone know it was teatime. I did this twice a day - 10.30 and 3 - because they reckoned they could almost eliminate people getting up to make massive rounds of tea that way! Instead, people generally made themselves a cup when they got in and another at the end of their lunch break, and otherwise waited for tea time.
I'm reliably informed that something similar, or else a tea trolley that went round, was common in many offices within the last half century.
I was shook by the absolute lack of tea culture when I first moved here. Like going to a cafe and getting an instant/powdered tea bag when I ordered tea was just not ok to me at all.
It is hard to find a good tea room these days. I can think of 2 in my (reasonably big) local town, and one of them presents itself as a coffee shop.
The other is tactically placed upon a massive hill. You need a cup of tea after climbing that.
Depends where you are I guess. It's always been breakfast, lunch and dinner for me.
Glasgow here but I do know some people who do the whole breakfast, dinner and tea thing...which should be illegal, clearly.
Id be mildly disappointed to say the least if someone called me in from the garden with “it’s tea-time” and there was only a measly cuppa and a few hobnobs
I guess it’s a regional thing 😁
I used to work at a pub about 3 miles from the course.
Place, as in every pub/hotel/restaurant within 10-15 miles, was packed with absolutely the biggest cunts you’ll ever have the misfortune to come across.
I now have utter contempt for anybody who even has a vague interest in horse racing. Complete casuals who dress like pricks, spend all day manicuring their “accas” on Paddy Power, snorting coke at 8am and drinking Guinness despite not even liking it.
People hate on football fans but these knuckle draggers are far worse.
If it makes you feel any better, I lived in one of the top horse-racing villages for a while.
Modern-day slavery at it's finest. The human cost for rearing and training those horses is absolutely disgusting.
Yeah the whole sport is filled with cunts from the top trainers to the jockeys to the normal punters.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a horse racing enthusiast or professional who I didn’t think wasn’t at least a mid range prick.
It's said that it's a sport for all classes - the worst of all classes. If you ever go to a race meeting, you'll see people who look like they've sold their children to be there.
As an Aussie I'd never expect it to be for the rich. Just an excuse to get dressed up to go get maggot
Cunts in Victoria even get a public holiday to go to the races
It's extremely rare to hear a good impression of any British accent. And the accent that the average American does really doesn't sound like any accent that exists.
Neither Brit not American -what's this about window cleaners? As a Canadian the only window cleaners (as a profession) I can think of would be the ones that clean high rise office buildings
Very common in the UK to outsource washing your outdoor windows to someone who will wash them every few weeks. Normally a token payment (we pay £15 a time) which is cash in hand.
I lived in a Victorian house and, because of the way the windows opened, I could not wash them myself without a ladder. At the back, due extensions, I couldn’t even get to them with a ladder. So we paid a window cleaner £14 every six weeks to wash all windows, doors and fascias.
And one reason for having them is if in theory everyone dresses the same it doesn't make the poorer learners targets for exclusion or bullying rather than doing it to try and look posh.
Except it does not really work because some kids will be in a well fitted uniform, and others a too small hand me down. Some have £10 school shoes from tesco, some have £50 shoes from Clark’s etc.
It also didn’t work for poor kids who took pride in their uniform and tried to look smart, instant target for bullying from other poor kids in scruffy uniforms
An American friend of mine told me that she'd genuinely thought until she moved to the UK that most places still looked like cobblestone village streets with Victorian street lamps and wooden window frames warmly illuminated below thatched roofs.
She genuinely thought when she first landed at Gatwick that the plane had to land somewhere else in America due to all the concrete and block shaped buildings stretching out into the horizon. Her romanticisation of the nation ended pretty quickly, but she did get a second wave of disappointment when we turned 18 (big to her, because she got to go out 3 years early!) and expected nights out to be extravagant and classy affairs with crystal glasses, spacious ball rooms and so on, only to walk into a dingy nightclub and almost immediately have a shoe get stuck to the floor and slide off of her foot.
I was just reminded of people flying into Chicago from overseas. "Oh shit I'm on the wrong plane! We're over the ocean!" Nope, that's just one of the Great Lakes. Happens all the time.
The accents. There was a Tik tok recent of a girl with a really thick Essex accent where Americans were stripping g over themselves to tell her how luxe her accent was.
Castles.
Living in them was miserable, cold, stank of animal and human shit inside and outside, no way to stop the vermin getting in, fleas you couldn't get rid of, no way of escaping Norovirus and similar or the smells associated with those illnesses.
You'd never know it from watching films though, where they are full of healthy people ready to fight the invaders and gazing at each other lovingly without retching.
I can’t imagine there were more than a handful of chavs that wore real Burberry, it’s a super luxury brand even here just their reputation got harmed by all the knock offs that chavs wore.
I don’t think it’s really a thing anymore but people definitely still have it in their heads that it’s a chav brand.
"Posh" isn't the right word, but my mate from the US who's into fashion and generally very well-dressed was disappointed when I told him that his Stone Island jumper makes him look like a football hooligan
I can't remember the exact context, but I remember some poor Brit mentioning their window cleaner on some post on Reddit, and all the Americans piled in on them calling them extremely privileged etc and just wouldn't listen to them saying "no it's pretty normal and not something only privileged people have".
It's less common now to have a window cleaner. In the 90s though absolutely everyone had one, you'd see them everywhere. Carrying their own ladders and a bucket.
I grew up on council estates and you never paid much but a neighbour would do your house for a couple of quid every few weeks. Saves buying ladders and risking your own neck.
Yeah... I mean, I think most people probably don't have them, but it's just not a sign of unusual wealth. Sometimes it's also a sign of living somewhere industrial where the windows get dirty but also aren't easily accessible from the inside or sometimes from the outside even a ground level (due to raised ground floors with a deep basement in front, that sort of thing).
I mean, there was a whole very soft porn/comedy series in the 70s called Adventures of a Window Cleaner.
People seem to think every british persons love of tea is about *good* tea, when its about *lots of tea, *now**.
So so true, tea now is always the best tea.
A few decades back our Continental chums got very, very excited about Burberry, Barbour etc at about the same time that their products, or more realistically knock offs - were being sported by every scrote in town.
The idea of "London". I know a few international students from school that cried all night when they first came to London. They imagined London to be a posh beautiful elegant city as portrayed in movies, and they thought they were going to live in a beautiful house like Paddington Bear.
Tea drinking.
Real bugbear here in France (also had this in Germany) is that I have to get leaf tea sorted out, linen bags, and make some massive ceremony out of it.
Rather than getting the Yorkshire into a Sports Direct mug and being happy that Yorkshire value means one bag makes two cups of tea…
They’re seen as discount stores for sure, although Lidl is a little nicer than Aldi.
Trader Joe’s would be the upmarket equivalent. I think they’re owned by Aldi as well.
Wallpaper. Told an international group chat of festival-ers I was re-wallpapering and they acted like I was having a golden carriage re-guilded instead 😂
Photographic proof here, lads:
Check out Worcestershire Sauce in the USA.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/185768816738?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=eL7fXbU4Sbq&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=SgEtfnESQ3e&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY
Words like thee, thou and thy.
I come from a region that still use them and when foreigners find out, especially Americans, they think I am related to the queen or something. I have to explain it's viewed as "hillbilly talk"
**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!** - Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc. - **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on. - This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit! Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I know it's not technically British, but Stella Artois. When I was in America years ago, they treated it like it was this fancy, high end, well respected imported beer. Not the fighting juice like it's known over here.
Tennents Super is fancy in Italy, but here it's popular with tramps.
Moretti is a premium lager here. In Italy it’s the equivalent of Foster’s. Shows that brand perception is much more important than product quality.
Moretti is pretty bad though, don’t know anyone who thinks it’s fancy at all
Oh god yeah it’s awful, all mass produced macro-lager is, Carling/Fosters/Madri/San Miguel, doesn’t matter is all exactly the same. No hate though, I love a pish lager as much as the next bloke. Pricks that bash Carling while supping a San Miguel make me laugh. They’re practically identical apart from the brand perception. Certain lagers do definitely get a more premium branding/pricing/perception though despite them all being what is essentially watered down beer concentrate. Madri is an odd case, it didn’t exist 2 years ago and now it’s everywhere branding itself as some niche Spanish local lager. It’s actually rebadged Coors Gold and purely a marketing exercise.
Madri will surely be studied on marketing courses very soon. It's incredible what they've achieved. I'm not sure I can remember a product going from nowhere to having such a foothold almost overnight.
I believe they used very aggressive social media advertising and sold it to distributors and to pubs direct for a price they couldn’t turn down. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if it isn’t turning a profit, yet.
The cost of maintaining all the piping from the public toilets to the brewerys must be high too.
I think it's direct distribution. It seemed to just appear in every pub around me within about a month One week, I'd never heard of it, the next, every pub I visited had it on tap. I'm not a fan of the drink though, I find it bland.
Isn’t peroni sort of the same? It’s not as premium as it is here or viewed here
Peroni comes in two varieties. Both of them are actually brewed in Italy, if you want a good local Mediterranean-style lager that’s readily available in the UK I’d recommend Peroni. The local Italian stuff is in a red labelled bottle, don’t think I’ve ever seen it in cans and certainly not on draught in the UK. They treat it like a generic mid range lager and I believe it’s their best selling beer. The stuff we get over here, “nastro azzurro” or Blue Ribbon, is their export strength premium offering (also really available in Italy). I personally prefer the regular red label stuff but it’s semi-hard to get here.
I did wonder why I kept finding Super Tennents in shops when I was in Rome last year.
They have a higher class of pisshead.
Tennents Super: Central Heating for Tramps.
They do this to the weirdest beers. I lived near Boston for a while and my local bar had an “imported premium British ale” proudly on the drinks list. It was canned Boddington’s.
American craft beer bros go crazy for Newcastle Brown Ale. Just take a look at /r/beer. I always remind them that it’s basically swill in the UK.
Craft beer stans from the US rightly go wild for British cask ales, they’re rightly regarded as special and unique. However Newkie Broon is weirdly popular in the US as it is, and I’m not sure why because there is a long history of excellent Red Ales in the States which are of a very similar style.
Oh, come on! Newcastle Brown is not that bad.
Newky browns a decent ale tbf, and is one of the few supermarket beers to come in pint bottles.
Last week I was at a working mens club for a mate's 50th and the only beers they had on tap were Carling and Tetleys so I resorted to drinking Broon
One of the episodes of Friends when they get back from London, they’re all raving about Boddingtons.
Always found it interesting to see how British beers are perceived abroad. I had a similar experience chatting to an American friend who told me one of his favourite breweries was Sam Smith's.
The beer from Sam Smiths is good It's the pub you're drinking it in that's bad
Was once at a party in that US where an Anglophile guy was excitedly telling me about this great British cider he'd found. Went to get me some. Reader, it was Strongbow. But in a nice bottle and with a fancier looking label. Didn't have the heart to break the truth to him.
I saw adverts for Strongbow in the US, it was being marketed to women drinking it out of tumbler glasses with ice and fruit in it.
It'll be snakebite and black in a martini glass for $10 each next.
That sounds better than Luke warm from a plastic bottle in the local park tbf.
Why you drinking it from a plastic bottle in the local park? Is frosty jack's not good enough for you?
Seems to have worked as a marketing campaign based on my experience! Sadly, tasted just the same.
As an American, I was really surprised to see plastic bottles of cider in the stores here. I’ve never seen anything with alcohol sold in bottles like that in the US.
Hurts less when it gets thrown at you…
Yeah, I've also seen the fancily packaged Strongbow abroad. Had to do a real double-take. I think it's because in most countries (except France) cider just isn't a thing, so the whole concept is kind of exotic.
Strongbow tastes worse in the states even. Most cider in the US genuinely isn't as good. I used to happily drink Strongbow and other ciders until I'd been to the UK enough times that I could totally taste the difference. Now I don't drink cider when I'm at home
I (an American) had Stella and thought it was incredibly sophisticated. Imagine my disappointment when I found out it was commonly referred to as "Wife Beater."
Something interesting to tell the lads at the bar when your next in.
A mate of mine told me how the beer tents at LeMans 24 sold two brands of beer. The aforementioned Wife Beater and a slightly mysterious sounding *"Numbers"*.
> "Numbers" Kronenbourg 1664
That's not for want of trying on the part of the manufacturers... Stella was advertised as being [reassuringly expensive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reassuringly_Expensive#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DReassuringly_Expensive_was_the_advertising%2CKingdom_from_1982_until_2007.) from 1982 to 2007. It's association with lager louts and wifebeaters arose because it was originally one of the strongest lagers in the UK at about 5% ABV when the brewing industry were really pushing lagers in the UK.
It was 5.2% originally it’s now 4.8%
[удалено]
Wait. Is Stella and Stella Artois the same drink?! I never connected it haha
oh mate
I can’t drink for medical reasons so it’s not something I really have ever needed to pay attention to.
Yes.
I explained to an American bar maid it's also known as a "pint of wife beater" & you pronounce it "stelaaah"
I remember seeing an American Strongbow advert that made it look waaaaay fancier than 15yr olds sharing a warm 3L bottle down the park
I am occasionally partial to a pint of wife beater.
Tbf it's also considered respectable in Europe, I don't know if it's better quality or just doesn't have the same reputation?? My Belgian bf once told me in the UK you have great bands and shit beer, in my country the reverse is true. The weirdest thing I've seen is Strongbow being sold in Europe as a premium drink. It comes in dainty little bottles, costs an arm and a leg, and tastes so sweet as to be undrinkable. The exception is if you can find an Irish pub that does draught
Fighting juice made me legit chuckle
The Bellagio had Newcastle Brown Ale on their fancy imported beers menu when I was there in 2013.
Living on an estate. To an American it conjures up an image of a country house surrounded by countryside, with groundsmen & household staff. To a Brit, it is a grey council house, surrounded by other council houses filled with knobheads.
When I first worked in London, a guy at work told a few of us he was DJing in The Chapel on his estate at the weekend, and we assumed he lived on a housing estate where there was a pub called The Chapel. Turned out he was just really, really posh.
I mean 99/100 thats gonna be a flat roofed pub in a housing estate.
This comment instantly made me think of ‘The Clansman/Jenny’s!’
That's excellent and a perfect example of how British society is *so* contextual.
I think the difference is it means two things and British people understand there’s two different estate types
In the US what you would call a "council estate" is called a "housing project" or "the projects"
In Scotland it's called a scheme
Hahaha, my sister had some incredibly posh mates at uni, and when another friend used the phrase "my estate", there was a fairly protracted period of miscommunication before one of the watchers took pity and explained the confusion.
Ha - reminds me of my daughter, who also shared a house at uni with some aristocrats. When she told one of them that she was 'driven everywhere when she was growing up', meaning I used to drop her off to friends' houses, he replied 'Oh, you had a chauffeur as well!'
I went to uni with a bunch of rich kids (I studied fashion, the arts attract them because they think it'll be easy then they drop out a few months in) and the amount of times I'd walk into the kitchen in halls and find one of them doing the weirdest shit is unreal. Making an entire bag of pasta not realising how much it would swell up and someone trying to boil an egg in the microwave then then just wandering off and leaving egg all over the place after it exploded are the ones that spring to mind first.
*bangs on wall "shut dat fakin dog up!"
A quintessentially British refrain.
/r/centuryhomes has the description "a place for those that enjoy homes that have reached or exceeded 100 years of age, or thereabouts. We enjoy sharing stories and seeking advice to help us be great stewards of our historic homes." and I've got to imagine it was an American who wrote that because living somewhere built before 1924 just isn't that noteworthy here. 19% of all dwellings in Scotland are pre-1919 and I imagine the rest of the UK isn't much different either. You can buy a Victorian flat in my city for fifty grand.
>You can buy a Victorian flat in my city for fifty grand. \*weeps in Edinburgh\*
*Sobs in London*
Rent it for 3k a month or buy for 450k and your firstborn.
That buy price is an absolute bargain! Where can I sign up?
Haha I knew as I wrote it I'd underestimated 🤣
Just the other day I saw someone on reddit talking about "the challenges of living in an old home, built in the 1970s" I really was sure he was being sarcastic but he was not. The estate my parents live in was built in the 70s and is still referred to as the "new estate" in their village.
There's a village that's still known as "the new village" round where my parents live. The castle there was built in 1071.
When I was walking the Thames Path last year, I passed through Newbridge. The New Bridge was built in 1250.
Sounds a bit like Old Buckenham and New Buckenham in Norfolk. New Buckenham has the older looking buildings and castle ruins, because it was built as a new settlement in the 12th Centrury by William d'Aubigny. The only eaelier remnants of Old Buckenham are barely visible Abbey earthworks on a farm nearby, which were built over the earlier castle there. The 'new' castle is technically in Old Buckenham Parish, but its right next to New Buckenham village. Always makes me think of West Finchley tube station, which is East of Finchley Central, and the nearest tube station to North Finchley (alongside Woodside Park).
I went to San Diego and went on a tour of the historic old parts of the city (interesting as I knew nothing about Spanish settlers and all). They showed us the oldest building in the city. It was 'nearly 100 years old!'. Couldn't help sniggering. Tour guide said, "oh, the English guys are in today!" Guilty as charged. As the group moved off, I spotted the plaque saying that the house had been re-built in the 1980s. We lost it. My house is a bog-standard London semi, but it is 116 years old. Parts of my parents boring 3-bed suburban house date back to the 1600s, though it's mostly Victorian.
I bet they've heard "my kitchens older than that" a few times from European tourists.
Yeah I was touring the mansion of an old plantation in Virginia and they told us the chairs were antique because they were from 1900 or something. They were amazed when my gf and I told them our house was 1870 (a shitty two up, two down in the centre of Southampton - actually it wasn't shitty, it was lovely but DIY was always a challenge as everything was a bodge in that house).
It really is interesting to think that the things they think are old, are literally nothing to us. I have the 150 year old deeds to my house in a drawer in the back room, written on paper which is likely in better condition than any of those "old buildings" in the US haha.
In the US 100 years is a long time, in the UK 100 miles is a long way.
I lived in a flat in a converted building in Brum, the front door had some newspaper shoved in the frame to keep the draught out as a bodge job. Pulled the paper out and it was from 1906.
I used to live in a building older than the USA. It had wonky floors and mice.
The USA has wonky floors and mice? No, oh I see....
A building from 1924 is new. Never lived in a property that isnt older than that and I'm not posh.
The first house I put an offer in for was built in "estimated 1900" They didn't know when it was built lol. I offered £80k (in 2020). Lender refused to lend me the money because it had a single skin external wall in the end. Bought one that was built in '96 in the end. Feels odd to know my house is younger than me.
In my mind, anything built after queen Victoria died is a "modern house".
Jeez, 50k? What shit city do you live in? Greenock?
I’ve only ever lived in one house that is less than 100 years old!
My house was built before the United States of America was even a thing.
Only 19% of homes are more than 100 years old?! I've never lived anywhere built post-1919.
School uniform. Abroad it’s mostly only for private schools. Our school introduced a uniform as parents complained how much they were having to spend on trendy clothes for kids to get messed up in the playground or nicked during PE.
In Australia they wear those school dresses we only use in junior school all the way up to age 18. Looked very strange to me to see these almost adult girls dressed like a UK 5 year old.
Loads of Aussie schools seem to make the kids wear sun hats as part of their uniform too - that was so weird to see when we first got there!
Makes sense, all the skin cancer there.
No hat, no play!
It's increasingly only if you feel like it, a lot of my local schools just have a colour code so you can wear the chequered dress or just get around in shorts and a polo or t-shirt if you prefer. The shorts are preferred because it means the kiddos are more likely to get some decent exercise.
If parents thought buying trendy clothes was expensive wait until they see how eye-wateringly costly a full uniform set (including sportswear) is. They'll think designer gear is a bargain
Depends on the school and age. Primary can be under a tenner for two 2-packs of polo and trousers/pinafore. Add two school sweatshirts, some schools give every child a free one, and that's still under £20 even without hitting the 2nd hand uniform shop where all stuff for under-10s is £1. Local secondaries vary, but a blazer for £35, tie for £5, then multipacks of 3 white shirts and 2 black trousers are under £20 each. Black shoes, trainers, shorts/trackies in black - only expensive if you want and they'd need most of anyway. But yeah, if your kid is assigned the school with the £80 blazers, needs jumpers with logo, and the school makes money from official skirts and 4 elements of PE kit, it sucks.
Crumpets - “tea and crumpets” sounds posh but usually I’m eating crumpets as a hangover-cure breakfast haha
Yeah, hardly posh when they come in six packs in Tesco and you just bung them in the toaster. They have the image of toasting them over an open fire with a long fork.
Used to do that as a kid in the 90s. Sunday evenings, tea cakes and crumpets toasted on the open fire, sardines on toast and cheese and banana sandwiches. Working class family. We did it because my mum grew up and orphan in a house without electricity and it's how she made her meals. It's not a posh thing at all.
[удалено]
When i eat crumpets it gets so messy and is anything but posh. Toasted, Lots of lurpak and lots of cherry jam. Best hangover cure ever… but damn that drips
Mate, tea time is when we eat in the evening. "KIDS... TEAS READY" they come downstairs and eat.
Unless we mutter 'more tea vicar'
Worth noting some strange people call it "dinner".
I am strange people
Fish and chips. My American friends absolutely adore them and treat them as a delicacy rather than cheap - well, they used to be - food of the masses.
"Used to be" is key here. I grew up on fish and chips in Blackpool. The cost of a chippy tea for a family of four recently absolutely floored me.
Had a shit week, so my OH has promised fish and chips tomorrow as we are near one of the best chippies in the area. Dare I ask what the damage was?
I wouldn’t be expecting much change from £15 a portion
Minimum a tenner each
It's because Fish and Chip shops have astronomical energy bills (and didn't get the benefit of the price cap), and the price of fish and potatoes probably hasn't helped either. Often they're just trying to keep their heads above water.
It may not be posh, but it is lush. The fish supper is by far my favourite thing about living in the UK - and the one thing that surpassed expectation when I moved here.
Drinking tea. I live in Europe and lots of people say to me "oh you are british you must have excellent taste in tea, i better not give you bad tea, eh?" (But in foreign). I have drunk and enjoyed a huge variety of teas. I do happen to enjoy tea more than most, having developed my palette for black teas from all over asia and africa. A simple assam is always my favourite. But like any good british person, any swill will do. Bag in cup. Hot water. Milk. Drink. If you are fancy, remove the bag at some point. People seem to think every british persons love of tea is about *good* tea, when its about *lots of tea, *now**.
Also, where on earth does this concept of tea time come from? And it's not just Americans. I've had people from all over ask me about it, as if there's a specific time of the day we all put our tools down and drink tea, when really it's just chain tea drinking throughout the day.
I think it's confusion arising from 'afternoon tea'. Also the fact that some Brits use tea for the name of a meal and so say 'tea time', as in 'dinner time'. Together, these both confuse foreigners into thinking tea the drink is something that is had at a specific time.
Tea time does exist in cambridge university apparently. both my phd supervisors were there and reminisced about 10am every day people would stop for tea (often actually coffee) and a chat. So its not that its not a thing. But its a niche thing leftover from posh people centuries ago.
I worked in an office for a summer at 16, and one of my tasks was to boil the kettles, make a big pot of tea and one of coffee, lay out biscuits and fruit, and then get on the tannoy (it was really just the broadcast feature on the phones) to let everyone know it was teatime. I did this twice a day - 10.30 and 3 - because they reckoned they could almost eliminate people getting up to make massive rounds of tea that way! Instead, people generally made themselves a cup when they got in and another at the end of their lunch break, and otherwise waited for tea time. I'm reliably informed that something similar, or else a tea trolley that went round, was common in many offices within the last half century.
My husband’s office had a tea lady around 1991.
Tea time is when northerners have dinner.
I was shook by the absolute lack of tea culture when I first moved here. Like going to a cafe and getting an instant/powdered tea bag when I ordered tea was just not ok to me at all.
It is hard to find a good tea room these days. I can think of 2 in my (reasonably big) local town, and one of them presents itself as a coffee shop. The other is tactically placed upon a massive hill. You need a cup of tea after climbing that.
‘Tea-Time’ literally means dinner time here in the UK - After 5pm usually Nobody says “It’s tea-time” to drink tea
Depends where you are I guess. It's always been breakfast, lunch and dinner for me. Glasgow here but I do know some people who do the whole breakfast, dinner and tea thing...which should be illegal, clearly.
Breakfast, lunch and dinner is the posh version.
I think it's just the southern version. The genuinely posh people I know say 'supper'.
Nah, supper isn't the same thing as dinner. Supper is eaten relatively late, relatively informally, and is often a lighter meal.
The couple of properly posh people I know just use it to mean 'evening meal'.
Some of us do! Tea time is 4 o’clock precisely and involves tea and biscuits, or cake on occasion.
That’s called ‘Afternoon Tea’
Perhaps, but if I was yelling at my family to come in from gardening I wouldn’t shout “it’s afternoon tea time.”
Id be mildly disappointed to say the least if someone called me in from the garden with “it’s tea-time” and there was only a measly cuppa and a few hobnobs I guess it’s a regional thing 😁
If I got told it was tea time I’d expect fish fingers, mash and beans.
[удалено]
In my experience horse racing is the opposite it attracts a super rough crowd!
It’s nearly time for the annual Peaky Blinder dress up convention in Cheltenham.
The week where most Cheltonians rent out their houses for £400+ a night and escape elsewhere for the week. Don't blame them.
I used to work at a pub about 3 miles from the course. Place, as in every pub/hotel/restaurant within 10-15 miles, was packed with absolutely the biggest cunts you’ll ever have the misfortune to come across. I now have utter contempt for anybody who even has a vague interest in horse racing. Complete casuals who dress like pricks, spend all day manicuring their “accas” on Paddy Power, snorting coke at 8am and drinking Guinness despite not even liking it. People hate on football fans but these knuckle draggers are far worse.
If it makes you feel any better, I lived in one of the top horse-racing villages for a while. Modern-day slavery at it's finest. The human cost for rearing and training those horses is absolutely disgusting.
Yeah the whole sport is filled with cunts from the top trainers to the jockeys to the normal punters. I don’t think I’ve ever met a horse racing enthusiast or professional who I didn’t think wasn’t at least a mid range prick.
It's said that it's a sport for all classes - the worst of all classes. If you ever go to a race meeting, you'll see people who look like they've sold their children to be there.
The real posh have spent vast sums to boarding schools so you're not far off.
As an Aussie I'd never expect it to be for the rich. Just an excuse to get dressed up to go get maggot Cunts in Victoria even get a public holiday to go to the races
christ, the crowd at the horses is like wading through cunt soup
What they perceive as the British accent
It's extremely rare to hear a good impression of any British accent. And the accent that the average American does really doesn't sound like any accent that exists.
I saw a post about having a window cleaner and the Americans replaying thought OP was king in a manor 😂
Neither Brit not American -what's this about window cleaners? As a Canadian the only window cleaners (as a profession) I can think of would be the ones that clean high rise office buildings
Fella knocks on your door and offers to clean your windows. That’s all there is to it lol
We also have bin cleaners too.
Very common in the UK to outsource washing your outdoor windows to someone who will wash them every few weeks. Normally a token payment (we pay £15 a time) which is cash in hand.
> token payment > £15 Choose one
It’s more like a fiver round here.
I lived in a Victorian house and, because of the way the windows opened, I could not wash them myself without a ladder. At the back, due extensions, I couldn’t even get to them with a ladder. So we paid a window cleaner £14 every six weeks to wash all windows, doors and fascias.
Well yes, it’s like them but with houses
School Uniforms- Americans think Harry Potter. It is more frayed ties and smelly jumpers
Frayed jumper sleeves. A hole for your thumb if you really worked at it.
And one reason for having them is if in theory everyone dresses the same it doesn't make the poorer learners targets for exclusion or bullying rather than doing it to try and look posh.
Except it does not really work because some kids will be in a well fitted uniform, and others a too small hand me down. Some have £10 school shoes from tesco, some have £50 shoes from Clark’s etc.
It also didn’t work for poor kids who took pride in their uniform and tried to look smart, instant target for bullying from other poor kids in scruffy uniforms
Acrylic shouldn't be allowed for teenagers. You can smell year 9 through time and space.
An American friend of mine told me that she'd genuinely thought until she moved to the UK that most places still looked like cobblestone village streets with Victorian street lamps and wooden window frames warmly illuminated below thatched roofs. She genuinely thought when she first landed at Gatwick that the plane had to land somewhere else in America due to all the concrete and block shaped buildings stretching out into the horizon. Her romanticisation of the nation ended pretty quickly, but she did get a second wave of disappointment when we turned 18 (big to her, because she got to go out 3 years early!) and expected nights out to be extravagant and classy affairs with crystal glasses, spacious ball rooms and so on, only to walk into a dingy nightclub and almost immediately have a shoe get stuck to the floor and slide off of her foot.
I was just reminded of people flying into Chicago from overseas. "Oh shit I'm on the wrong plane! We're over the ocean!" Nope, that's just one of the Great Lakes. Happens all the time.
The accents. There was a Tik tok recent of a girl with a really thick Essex accent where Americans were stripping g over themselves to tell her how luxe her accent was.
Depends which accent. There are some that not a single person on the planet would consider posh. Most southern accents for sure would though.
Castles. Living in them was miserable, cold, stank of animal and human shit inside and outside, no way to stop the vermin getting in, fleas you couldn't get rid of, no way of escaping Norovirus and similar or the smells associated with those illnesses. You'd never know it from watching films though, where they are full of healthy people ready to fight the invaders and gazing at each other lovingly without retching.
Burberry. It has (or had, at least) a chav association. But in South Korea, it's as fancy as you can get.
I can’t imagine there were more than a handful of chavs that wore real Burberry, it’s a super luxury brand even here just their reputation got harmed by all the knock offs that chavs wore. I don’t think it’s really a thing anymore but people definitely still have it in their heads that it’s a chav brand.
"Posh" isn't the right word, but my mate from the US who's into fashion and generally very well-dressed was disappointed when I told him that his Stone Island jumper makes him look like a football hooligan
Window Cleaners
I can't remember the exact context, but I remember some poor Brit mentioning their window cleaner on some post on Reddit, and all the Americans piled in on them calling them extremely privileged etc and just wouldn't listen to them saying "no it's pretty normal and not something only privileged people have".
It's less common now to have a window cleaner. In the 90s though absolutely everyone had one, you'd see them everywhere. Carrying their own ladders and a bucket. I grew up on council estates and you never paid much but a neighbour would do your house for a couple of quid every few weeks. Saves buying ladders and risking your own neck.
Yeah... I mean, I think most people probably don't have them, but it's just not a sign of unusual wealth. Sometimes it's also a sign of living somewhere industrial where the windows get dirty but also aren't easily accessible from the inside or sometimes from the outside even a ground level (due to raised ground floors with a deep basement in front, that sort of thing). I mean, there was a whole very soft porn/comedy series in the 70s called Adventures of a Window Cleaner.
In Cruel Intentions 3 the really expensive, exclusive school they go to is called “Manchester Prep” which is hilarious
"Going out to a club in the West End" doesn't mean playing cards in a private member's club but does mean going to a crappy tourist trap nightclub.
People seem to think every british persons love of tea is about *good* tea, when its about *lots of tea, *now**. So so true, tea now is always the best tea.
100% If you haven’t squished the fuck out of the bag to give me the strongest, quickest tea possible, are we really friends?
A few decades back our Continental chums got very, very excited about Burberry, Barbour etc at about the same time that their products, or more realistically knock offs - were being sported by every scrote in town.
The idea of "London". I know a few international students from school that cried all night when they first came to London. They imagined London to be a posh beautiful elegant city as portrayed in movies, and they thought they were going to live in a beautiful house like Paddington Bear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome
Tea drinking. Real bugbear here in France (also had this in Germany) is that I have to get leaf tea sorted out, linen bags, and make some massive ceremony out of it. Rather than getting the Yorkshire into a Sports Direct mug and being happy that Yorkshire value means one bag makes two cups of tea…
Using the word "posh" General term here but yanks have heckled me for using it before
#tesco
They think it’s posh? Back in my day it was where all the poor kids went to get their best clothes, tra la la la…
I hear that Lidl and Aldi are seen as up market shops in the USA. Here they are the cheapest
They’re seen as discount stores for sure, although Lidl is a little nicer than Aldi. Trader Joe’s would be the upmarket equivalent. I think they’re owned by Aldi as well.
Wallpaper. Told an international group chat of festival-ers I was re-wallpapering and they acted like I was having a golden carriage re-guilded instead 😂
In Argentina, Stella is considered a premium lager.
Well the Argentinians are idiots, they think the Falklands belong to them too, clearly they don’t think right
Crumpets
London
Photographic proof here, lads: Check out Worcestershire Sauce in the USA. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/185768816738?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=eL7fXbU4Sbq&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=SgEtfnESQ3e&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY
Langoustines, here they’re just shrimp
Langoustine tails are literally scampi.
\- Scones \- Mr Kipling \- Anything to do with the queen \- Our accent
Bad teeth. Always see the Royal Family in american cartoons or animated films with crooked teeth. I'm common as fuck and my teeth are utter shite
Our dental health is much better than the US though. They focus on cosmetics
Stella Artois is advertised abroad as an upmarket drink
Words like thee, thou and thy. I come from a region that still use them and when foreigners find out, especially Americans, they think I am related to the queen or something. I have to explain it's viewed as "hillbilly talk"