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IS THIS CRICKET? Star City in Birmingham is Britain's splashiest American-style mall. Shopping as entertainment is gaining popularity
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Look around the Hoe in Plymouth, the seafront park where Sir Francis Drake showed his sangfroid in 1588 by finishing a game of bowls before sailing out to vanquish the Spanish Armada, and you see a lot that is enduring about Britain. Sangfroid, for one. In a frigid blustery rain that elsewhere in Europe would drive sane people indoors, a dad is teaching his daughter to ride a bike, a soggy man is flying a kite, an elderly matron is strolling in a brown coat and sensible shoes.
Stretching in front of them toward France is the shield and barrier of the sea, still the most salient geographic fact about Britain. Behind them is the city of Plymouth, where hectares of soulless concrete buildings that might have been designed by East German communists have replaced what the Luftwaffe destroyed. And between sea and city is a monument to the countless dead from the 20th century's wars, in this case "to the abiding memory of these ranks and ratings of this port who laid down their lives in the defence of the Empire and have no other grave than the sea."
This was the last stop on my journey through Britain, a trip that began in the relaxed good order of Copenhagen, Denmark and ended in Bilbao, in Spain's Basque country, via Aberdeen, a floating North Sea oil platform, the Isle of Lewis off Scotland's west coast, Paisley near Glasgow, Dublin, York, Birmingham, Bristol, Tavistock, Plymouth, and finally a 30-hour ferry ride in seasick-making 12-meter waves to Spain.
Looking at the Plymouth war memorial, the common thread of my journey became clear: in Britain's national life, World War II is finally over. The exuberance, prosperity and cosmopolitanism I saw in the U.K. reflect a sea change that has made it a country the men named on that column would find surprising — though I doubt they would dislike it. The energy of the people I encountered, their easy ties to Europe and the rest of the world via cheap travel and the Internet, and especially their confidence in the future, are perhaps the greatest possible testament to the sacrifices of their parents and grandparents.
People tend to forget how powerfully the war stamped itself on Britain's psyche: queues and rationing, big government institutions directing (successfully) just about everything, a persistent habit of improvising quickly rather than overhauling systematically. The first decade of recovery was an austere struggle as the country fought to stay afloat without earnings from foreign assets that had been sold off to pay for the war. In 1952, for example, the government refused just $24 million to found a British equivalent of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, over furious objections from scientists convinced the country's prosperity required it. Living standards improved but didn't keep pace with Britain's competitors.
When I lived in Oxfordshire 20 years ago, the privations of the war and its aftermath still resonated. After a minor operation, my wife recuperated in a grim Quonset hut with 20 beds built originally for victims of Hitler's aggression and was fed cold vegetables that might have been boiled since V-E day. We were lucky to find a flat with central heating; our landlord, true to his ingrained "make do and mend" philosophy, kept switching off the radiators and using a coat hanger to fix the oven door. Aneurin Bevan, the Labour stalwart who founded the National Health Service in 1948, shrewdly diagnosed the national problem as a "poverty of expectations." The country was stuck in a vicious circle of crummy housing, lousy service, second-rate schools, and people so used to it they didn't demand better.
Not any more. It isn't that Britain in 2000 lacks poor people or bad schools or racism. But the country is choosier, more worldly, more fun. The spirit of self-confident sophistication is obvious in London, where I live. Huge profits from international finance are keeping restaurants and theaters full. Homeowners are upgrading from sludge-brown carpets and dangling bare bulbs to hardwood floors and recessed spotlights — if they can find a builder. Instead of the Stalinist blockhouses in which British postwar architects used to specialize, modern constructions like the Tate Modern and the Millennium Bridge are consistently stunning. There are TV ads for lawyers wanting you to sue "if you or a member of your family suffered an injury in the last three years that was not your fault" — an oddly healthy sign that people are becoming less docile about slipshod design and bureaucracy run amok. Business is so good, income taxes so low compared to the rest of Europe, that just under a million people from the European Union are now living in the U.K., most of them in London.
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Open All Hours
Britain has put World War II and boiled cabbage behind it at last as prosperity and the party spirit reaches remote Scottish islands
Photo Gallery
Check out the photos from this leg of TIME's Fast Forward Europe voyage
15 Minutes of Fame
Folklore and high finance mix on the quirky Isle of Man
Future Past
The British are having fun with their history
Devolution Revolution
A once-thriving Scottish town is finding ways and means to get people back to work and sell kilts online
Exodus Reversed
Prosperous Ireland is importing workers for a change — it's short of hands to milk cows and make computers
How to Get Noticed
Turner Prize nominee Simon Patterson on the British art scene
Back to School
The University of Oxford is wiring up ancient colleges and looking for private funding
Tower of Babble
British comedian Eddie Izzard talks with TIME's Chris Thornton
People To Watch: Eddie Izzard | Sadie Plant | Charles Muirhead | Jeremy Leggett
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