Following on from the positively deemed images of England we must come to a critique of the stereotypes which may be particularly unfair to the depiction of such a nation.  With good symbols inevitably comes the bad, and with the idea of England being fused into the consciousness’ of many international nationalities there come a series of bad symbolic referents. Here we highlight just some of these and hope to open up debate.

5. Rain

Contrary to popular belief it doesn’t always rain in England. We have some very beautiful seasons of weather, if albeit slightly unpredictable. So rain may be a problem when having to plan outdoor activities, but does it outweigh the delightful surprise of an emerging sun on a cold winter’s day? As residents of England we come to appreciate our sun more, never taking a warm spot of weather for granted.  If we have to sacrifice a lot of rain over the winter months, I say it’s well worth it for every unusually sunny day. The element of surprise is the best of all.

4. Accents

Not everyone from England talks the Queen’s English. We don’t all speak like our news readers, our politicians or like our elitist intelligentsia. This speaks for all countries, to take the monarch as the unifying singular image of a nations people, is a grave mistake to make indeed. Travel nationwide and you will find a wealth of accents and dialects despite our relatively tiny square mileage.

3. Noble Ancestry

“No I don’t know the Queen, nor am I a Lord or Earl!”. Some assumptions can be quite bizarre, to deduce that most English residents; that of a population of sixty million, are somehow related to nobility is a strange one indeed. While there are a varying number of families that bear members with noble titles, to use this stereotype alone, is to be increasingly dismissive of the proletarian working classes who have helped to establish this country over the many hundreds of years.

2. Castle’s

With the perceived ties that each English migrant or tourist has to noble ancestry, there comes the grander assumption that they all must reside within the impenetrable walls of their own abode of grandeur. Whilst castles retain their positions as breathtaking monuments to the medieval age of this country, we must remind others that they are not uniquely ours but that of an architecture rooted deeply in Germanic Europe.

1.  Football Hooligans

Hollywood’s recent spate of football related gang warfare films certainly points to our country as the stronghold of football hooliganism. To some extent this is true and the nation justly deserves such a view, but what of the masses that love the game and are unjustly let down by small minorities of troublemakers? To centre England at the heart of violent sport fanaticism is wholly unfair to the consideration that other countries are justly contributable and even more so dangerous.