People that visited the UK, what culture shocked you the most?
May 16, 2025
What was the biggest culture shock during your visit that you saw?
28 comments
Not much, I’ve grown up with a lot of BBC so I got a decent slice of life. It didn’t prepare me for all the commercial TV networks broadcasting nothing but daytime TV reality documentary series.
Depends a lot also on what part they visited lol, like you’re not gonna come across 12th July parades in like Devon for example 🤣
Single glass windows, water pipes on the outside wall, separate water taps, using gas burners inside the bathroom to heat water, people eating crisps for lunch.
This probably isn’t something that a tourist would notice during a short-term stay in the UK, but the British class system, and the general obsession with social class that British people have, is a really strange but also fascinating aspect of British culture from a foreigner’s perspective.
Milk being sold by the pint! A shocked Irishman here and this was one of the small things for which I was genuinely surprised, as a pint in my country is used exclusively in a pub.
One other thing, is that I get the sense that English people in particular have an oversized sense of the size of their country. I spoke with people who considered 60 miles to be an enormous undertaking. In Ireland there are people who do that as a daily commute each way.
Went to Cambridge for a few hours during a long layover and I was just fascinated how “everything is as on TV” – an old lady was calling me “honey” or something similar, on the way to Cambridge I saw cows munching on grass and it was raining, the houses were like in every British TV show I’ve ever watched. It was just so much like what I’ve seen from the small screen I was shocked and fascinated – I expected it to be much different in realty (to be fair, had I stayed longer or lived there, I would have probably noticed all the ways England wasn’t like on TV).
Bevor I lived in London, I’ve read that it has the highest GDP per capita of all cities in the EU (back then UK was a member). I imaged London to be the richest part of the EU. But when I was there, I realized that most of the people in London are not affected by the high GDP. It is the banking sector that moves billions daily, but the average person in London struggles with rents and high costs.
Rent is extremly expensive, tenants have very little rights, and the houses are run down and not maintained. So you live in a run down house and pay for a room more than for a flat in Germany, where I’m from. I would never expect that IT and engineers share a flat.
Then I was also shocked how high the crime is. That was some years ago, unfortunately it got worse. Then the NHS. How can a rich country have a heathcare system where people die only because the ambulance doesn’t arrive on time?
But there were also positive cultural shocks, I expected people to be busy all the time. But the people were extremely friendly and interested and everything was slow. The cashier ask you how you are doing etc. Something that would never happen in Germany. Also humor at work was great, something we don’t have in Germany.
The switch on power plugs 😂 I thought it was really weird, but now I wish it was like that everywhere!
Not having the deli counters in the way Ireland does. Greggs rather than the Centra or petrol station deli. Can’t beat a good chicken fillet roll.
Also the amount of Costa Coffees. They are literally everywhere in Britain, there is no escape.
The price of train travel.
The amount of wall-to-wall carpet and the obesity rate, both things that were very reminiscent of the USA. I enjoyed my time there and was always welcomed with kindness, I’ve got some really fond memories of those trips and of the people I met, but those two things really stuck with me.
Having cider on tap. As central europeans thinking you get a pint of beer, and taste sweet apple cider was an experience haha
I’m half British and have been to the UK several times, so I don’t really get shocked by anything really. That being said when I did my master’s there I was surprised at how early everyone went for pre-drinks. I usually have dinner around 8 pm but would get called to go for pre-drinks at 7, forcing me to eat a lot earlier than I usually though 😭
And speaking of nightlife, bars and clubs closing so early.
The one culture that still shocks me are travellers.
When I arrived in the UK people started to tell me their own stories and experiences, and I honestly thought that they were exaggerating or making it up.
Now I live in a town where, every few years, we have a group of people in caravans park on a playing field, shit all over the grass and playgrounds, vandalise the area, dump building waste, and leave.
I’ve been here nearly 15 years now and It still boggles my mind that this can happen in a modern civilised country, and that it’s tolerated.
First time I went there was in 1999, I stayed in Lincolnshire for a month. I was shocked by the amount of older women with lots of tattoos and by the amount of really young teenagers getting very drunk (I was 16 and a lot of them were way younger than me).
Not being allowed into a Restaurant with a foreign Football Top on at the age of 8. My Dad had to take me and my Brother to a clothing Shop across the Street and buy us new Shirts for Dinner.
Quite a lot actually, I visited in 2012 for three weeks – Manchester. No joke I was offered drugs in the first pub I went to; that totally caught me off guard lol. I didn’t want to buy anything but I struck a small chat – no instincts, I know – the bartender barged in and cut that conversation short lol. It took me a while to understand the transportation network as there were different companies, and in most of the cities I’ve been to before the system has been pretty much unified. Cities were arranged in a different way than they are on the continent. I’m Polish, really wanted to speak to everyone and improve my English, did my best but there was a huge linguistic difference, at my best people referred to me as an American. Weird accents you’ve got there.
Living with Poles that I randomly found online, renting a room – three weeks is a long time, this was on a budget 😀 – was trauma inducing. Let’s not talk about that.
I loved a lot of things as well. People were generally much more friendly and talkative than we Poles are, parks were awesome, museums were cool. The first time I went to a British museum I was kinda surprised, why is there a large dinosaur there lol, it seems like museum is a false friend – art gallery is what I was looking for. Still the dinosaurs were cool and I enjoyed the planetarium. I loved the district of Manchester where the art gallery is located, old fancy brickhouses were wow. In the gallery I spent a lot of time inspecting paintings by Turner and the gallery guide approached me to say they’ve got more of them and that, since I’m so much into Turner, they’d give me a tour free of charge, this was really nice. Oh, and shopping streets. Funny you’ve got them with that shitty weather, but yeah actually I enjoyed them as well. 😉
Beer was shite though.
I visited the Manchester area and found it unsettling people were driving 70 km/h just four meters from someone’s front door. It was mostly small residential streets, stretched out for miles, and barely any medium roads in between different areas. The speeds didn’t match the surroundings at all. I wouldn’t want my kids walking to school in a place like that.
Power shower. For those who don’t know, it’s a system that boost the water pressure when it’s not strong enough to have a decent shower, the UK is the only country I’ve seen that. So you have an electrified box almost under the shower and first time I saw that, I thought how brilliant, I’m going to electrocute myself in no time.
Also carpet in bathroom. I mean not a small amount, the whole bathroom floor covered with deep carpet.
Coming from Germany, the absolutely horrible building quality.
Air leaks into buildings everywhere, lack of insulation, shoddy electrical installations, humidity build-up and therefore mold everywhere in bathrooms, heating systems like it’s 1880, …
It made me realize, what absolute treasure the German system of “duale Ausbildung” (vocational training) and “Meistertitel” (master of a craft, required for many crafts to run a company) actually is!
Carpeted bathroom. I’m trying to train my cat to use the toilet and she doesn’t like going in the bathroom because the tiles are cold on her paws so I see the usefulness but… gross…
Not exactly a ”shock”, but something we don’t really have in the Netherlands (same for many other countries in Europe) is the big presence of pubs and a whole lifestyle around it. You also pay while ordering instead of after you consumed your drinks/dinner, which is also a bit different than what we were used to. Really like how they do it over there.
Drinking culture. It’s just completely normalized compared to where I come from. Co-workers telling you they were drunk on Friday night and Saturday night so it was a good weekend 😄
Foxes. Foxes everywhere. And they’re so fucking cute.
Also dogs in pubs. I was blown away by that. The pub culture is so different there. I wouldn’t take my dogs to a pub at night per se but that’s for their own safety. But I’d absolutely love to take them with me during the day.
I have only been in the UK a few times, the last time was 20 years ago where I spent a night in Great Yarmouth, visiting an offshore wind power plant.
This small family owned hotel seemed like something out of faulty towers.
Strange plumbing, the vater heater for the shower/tub had a single cock that controlled the flow of water and for every revolution it changed between hot and cold. Flow and temperature could not be controlled independently.
Plumming on the outside of the building, seperate cold and hot tap for the sink.
The inside stairs was a maze and a fire trap, the main stairs did not connect to all all floors. You had to take some stairs half a floor up, inorder to take the main stairs down.
The weggies were cooked to mash.
1. The separate taps for hot and cold water in the bathroom sink is weird.
2. Beans on toast is…. actually good?
That there are two taps, one for warm and one for cold water. Felt like I had traveled back to the mid 20th century.
I’m from Belarus. The first time I visited Britain was in 2001, while I was living in the Czech Republic. What shocked me the most was the separate hot- and cold-water taps.
I went to England for the first time when I was 8 in 2009. My father was taking me to my first Liverpool game at Anfield. We got a taxi at John Lennon Airport. My father only speaks English so I was surprised that he was able to have a conversation with the foreign taxi driver as he was speaking a different language. My father replied in English and I was very confused.
Afterwards I asked my Dad “I didn’t you know you can understand another language? I thought they speak English in Liverpool?” He replied “He was speaking English, that’s a Scouse accent”😂 I legit thought the Liverpudlian taxi driver was foreign and speaking another language because his Scouse accent was so strong. So the Scouse accent was a big culture shock!
I’ve been over there loads of times since as it’s so easy to travel from Ireland. Liverpool is a great city and is after improving so much since 2009! It’s definitely worth a visit. Liverpool feels like a mix between England, Wales & Ireland all in one! The UK and Ireland are actually very similar & we get all of their news, tv, pop culture & political fallouts. So there aren’t many culture shocks, it almost feels like home. I’ve always been made feel very welcome as an Irish person there.
Their class system seems like a nightmare though. I’d hate to have grown up there because there is so much emphasis on a rigid, obsolete, ancient, social class system that seems to divide people more than anything. I really don’t understand it and I don’t really want to either as I find the concept of social class to be quite petty & childish.
Other than that, I always really liked the English in general tbh. My mother was born in Birmingham. Most of the English are very lovely people. Alot of the stereotypes about English people being arrogant or rude are simply not true. They probably don’t get a great rep from holidaying drunks but neither do Irish people. Most of them are very friendly, down to earth, polite and good craic!
28 comments
Not much, I’ve grown up with a lot of BBC so I got a decent slice of life. It didn’t prepare me for all the commercial TV networks broadcasting nothing but daytime TV reality documentary series.
Depends a lot also on what part they visited lol, like you’re not gonna come across 12th July parades in like Devon for example 🤣
Single glass windows, water pipes on the outside wall, separate water taps, using gas burners inside the bathroom to heat water, people eating crisps for lunch.
This probably isn’t something that a tourist would notice during a short-term stay in the UK, but the British class system, and the general obsession with social class that British people have, is a really strange but also fascinating aspect of British culture from a foreigner’s perspective.
Milk being sold by the pint! A shocked Irishman here and this was one of the small things for which I was genuinely surprised, as a pint in my country is used exclusively in a pub.
One other thing, is that I get the sense that English people in particular have an oversized sense of the size of their country. I spoke with people who considered 60 miles to be an enormous undertaking. In Ireland there are people who do that as a daily commute each way.
Went to Cambridge for a few hours during a long layover and I was just fascinated how “everything is as on TV” – an old lady was calling me “honey” or something similar, on the way to Cambridge I saw cows munching on grass and it was raining, the houses were like in every British TV show I’ve ever watched. It was just so much like what I’ve seen from the small screen I was shocked and fascinated – I expected it to be much different in realty (to be fair, had I stayed longer or lived there, I would have probably noticed all the ways England wasn’t like on TV).
Bevor I lived in London, I’ve read that it has the highest GDP per capita of all cities in the EU (back then UK was a member). I imaged London to be the richest part of the EU. But when I was there, I realized that most of the people in London are not affected by the high GDP. It is the banking sector that moves billions daily, but the average person in London struggles with rents and high costs.
Rent is extremly expensive, tenants have very little rights, and the houses are run down and not maintained. So you live in a run down house and pay for a room more than for a flat in Germany, where I’m from. I would never expect that IT and engineers share a flat.
Then I was also shocked how high the crime is. That was some years ago, unfortunately it got worse. Then the NHS. How can a rich country have a heathcare system where people die only because the ambulance doesn’t arrive on time?
But there were also positive cultural shocks, I expected people to be busy all the time. But the people were extremely friendly and interested and everything was slow. The cashier ask you how you are doing etc. Something that would never happen in Germany. Also humor at work was great, something we don’t have in Germany.
The switch on power plugs 😂 I thought it was really weird, but now I wish it was like that everywhere!
Not having the deli counters in the way Ireland does. Greggs rather than the Centra or petrol station deli. Can’t beat a good chicken fillet roll.
Also the amount of Costa Coffees. They are literally everywhere in Britain, there is no escape.
The price of train travel.
The amount of wall-to-wall carpet and the obesity rate, both things that were very reminiscent of the USA. I enjoyed my time there and was always welcomed with kindness, I’ve got some really fond memories of those trips and of the people I met, but those two things really stuck with me.
Having cider on tap. As central europeans thinking you get a pint of beer, and taste sweet apple cider was an experience haha
I’m half British and have been to the UK several times, so I don’t really get shocked by anything really. That being said when I did my master’s there I was surprised at how early everyone went for pre-drinks. I usually have dinner around 8 pm but would get called to go for pre-drinks at 7, forcing me to eat a lot earlier than I usually though 😭
And speaking of nightlife, bars and clubs closing so early.
The one culture that still shocks me are travellers.
When I arrived in the UK people started to tell me their own stories and experiences, and I honestly thought that they were exaggerating or making it up.
Now I live in a town where, every few years, we have a group of people in caravans park on a playing field, shit all over the grass and playgrounds, vandalise the area, dump building waste, and leave.
I’ve been here nearly 15 years now and It still boggles my mind that this can happen in a modern civilised country, and that it’s tolerated.
First time I went there was in 1999, I stayed in Lincolnshire for a month. I was shocked by the amount of older women with lots of tattoos and by the amount of really young teenagers getting very drunk (I was 16 and a lot of them were way younger than me).
Not being allowed into a Restaurant with a foreign Football Top on at the age of 8. My Dad had to take me and my Brother to a clothing Shop across the Street and buy us new Shirts for Dinner.
Quite a lot actually, I visited in 2012 for three weeks – Manchester. No joke I was offered drugs in the first pub I went to; that totally caught me off guard lol. I didn’t want to buy anything but I struck a small chat – no instincts, I know – the bartender barged in and cut that conversation short lol. It took me a while to understand the transportation network as there were different companies, and in most of the cities I’ve been to before the system has been pretty much unified. Cities were arranged in a different way than they are on the continent. I’m Polish, really wanted to speak to everyone and improve my English, did my best but there was a huge linguistic difference, at my best people referred to me as an American. Weird accents you’ve got there.
Living with Poles that I randomly found online, renting a room – three weeks is a long time, this was on a budget 😀 – was trauma inducing. Let’s not talk about that.
I loved a lot of things as well. People were generally much more friendly and talkative than we Poles are, parks were awesome, museums were cool. The first time I went to a British museum I was kinda surprised, why is there a large dinosaur there lol, it seems like museum is a false friend – art gallery is what I was looking for. Still the dinosaurs were cool and I enjoyed the planetarium. I loved the district of Manchester where the art gallery is located, old fancy brickhouses were wow. In the gallery I spent a lot of time inspecting paintings by Turner and the gallery guide approached me to say they’ve got more of them and that, since I’m so much into Turner, they’d give me a tour free of charge, this was really nice. Oh, and shopping streets. Funny you’ve got them with that shitty weather, but yeah actually I enjoyed them as well. 😉
Beer was shite though.
I visited the Manchester area and found it unsettling people were driving 70 km/h just four meters from someone’s front door. It was mostly small residential streets, stretched out for miles, and barely any medium roads in between different areas. The speeds didn’t match the surroundings at all. I wouldn’t want my kids walking to school in a place like that.
Power shower. For those who don’t know, it’s a system that boost the water pressure when it’s not strong enough to have a decent shower, the UK is the only country I’ve seen that. So you have an electrified box almost under the shower and first time I saw that, I thought how brilliant, I’m going to electrocute myself in no time.
Also carpet in bathroom. I mean not a small amount, the whole bathroom floor covered with deep carpet.
Coming from Germany, the absolutely horrible building quality.
Air leaks into buildings everywhere, lack of insulation, shoddy electrical installations, humidity build-up and therefore mold everywhere in bathrooms, heating systems like it’s 1880, …
It made me realize, what absolute treasure the German system of “duale Ausbildung” (vocational training) and “Meistertitel” (master of a craft, required for many crafts to run a company) actually is!
Carpeted bathroom. I’m trying to train my cat to use the toilet and she doesn’t like going in the bathroom because the tiles are cold on her paws so I see the usefulness but… gross…
Not exactly a ”shock”, but something we don’t really have in the Netherlands (same for many other countries in Europe) is the big presence of pubs and a whole lifestyle around it. You also pay while ordering instead of after you consumed your drinks/dinner, which is also a bit different than what we were used to. Really like how they do it over there.
Drinking culture. It’s just completely normalized compared to where I come from. Co-workers telling you they were drunk on Friday night and Saturday night so it was a good weekend 😄
Foxes. Foxes everywhere. And they’re so fucking cute.
Also dogs in pubs. I was blown away by that. The pub culture is so different there. I wouldn’t take my dogs to a pub at night per se but that’s for their own safety. But I’d absolutely love to take them with me during the day.
I have only been in the UK a few times, the last time was 20 years ago where I spent a night in Great Yarmouth, visiting an offshore wind power plant.
This small family owned hotel seemed like something out of faulty towers.
Strange plumbing, the vater heater for the shower/tub had a single cock that controlled the flow of water and for every revolution it changed between hot and cold. Flow and temperature could not be controlled independently.
Plumming on the outside of the building, seperate cold and hot tap for the sink.
The inside stairs was a maze and a fire trap, the main stairs did not connect to all all floors. You had to take some stairs half a floor up, inorder to take the main stairs down.
The weggies were cooked to mash.
1. The separate taps for hot and cold water in the bathroom sink is weird.
2. Beans on toast is…. actually good?
That there are two taps, one for warm and one for cold water. Felt like I had traveled back to the mid 20th century.
I’m from Belarus. The first time I visited Britain was in 2001, while I was living in the Czech Republic. What shocked me the most was the separate hot- and cold-water taps.
I went to England for the first time when I was 8 in 2009. My father was taking me to my first Liverpool game at Anfield. We got a taxi at John Lennon Airport. My father only speaks English so I was surprised that he was able to have a conversation with the foreign taxi driver as he was speaking a different language. My father replied in English and I was very confused.
Afterwards I asked my Dad “I didn’t you know you can understand another language? I thought they speak English in Liverpool?” He replied “He was speaking English, that’s a Scouse accent”😂 I legit thought the Liverpudlian taxi driver was foreign and speaking another language because his Scouse accent was so strong. So the Scouse accent was a big culture shock!
I’ve been over there loads of times since as it’s so easy to travel from Ireland. Liverpool is a great city and is after improving so much since 2009! It’s definitely worth a visit. Liverpool feels like a mix between England, Wales & Ireland all in one! The UK and Ireland are actually very similar & we get all of their news, tv, pop culture & political fallouts. So there aren’t many culture shocks, it almost feels like home. I’ve always been made feel very welcome as an Irish person there.
Their class system seems like a nightmare though. I’d hate to have grown up there because there is so much emphasis on a rigid, obsolete, ancient, social class system that seems to divide people more than anything. I really don’t understand it and I don’t really want to either as I find the concept of social class to be quite petty & childish.
Other than that, I always really liked the English in general tbh. My mother was born in Birmingham. Most of the English are very lovely people. Alot of the stereotypes about English people being arrogant or rude are simply not true. They probably don’t get a great rep from holidaying drunks but neither do Irish people. Most of them are very friendly, down to earth, polite and good craic!