The English Channel
Britain’s identity has been crafted through the centuries from its unique geography. Here John Hillman explains the importance of the English Channel to its island people
The stretch of sea-water that separates Britain from the continent has had many names throughout its long history: Mor Breizh, La Manche, Oceanus Britannicus, the English Channel.
Some are still in use today and others long forgotten. But whatever you wish to call it, and whether you find its grey-silver shimmer – that makes separating sky from sea a regular impossibility on most days – either dramatic and beautiful, or dreary and depressing, you have to be slightly in awe of the fact that this little aquatic through route has had a bigger influence on shaping the modern world than perhaps all the oceans, seas and great lakes of the world combined.
P&O Ferries sail daily between the continent and Britain, sharing the shipping lanes with over 400 other vessels, all contributing to it being one of the world’s busiest shipping routes. And while the Channel remains vastly important to the economic health of the UK and many other parts of the world, its real contribution has been to cut off a country from its neighbours and protect them from the political storms and vacillations that regularly swept across Europe, giving its Island dwellers the freedom to develop the English language and pioneer experiments in law and democracy.
In fact had the great floods that created the Channel not occurred, somewhere between 450,000 and 180,000 years ago, would 90% of all the traffic on the internet in 2008 be conducted in English?
When we look back on our history one thing that is always reaffirmed is the crucial role that geography has played in the fortunes of a nation. The channel, with its perilous tidal waters and its unpredictable weather, has saved Britain from conquest on numerous occasions; checking the Spanish Empire, Napoleon and Nazi Germany in the last 400 years alone.
It was the first of these victories that would lead Britain to establish an Empire, something that many people around the world would say was a source of regret, others a source of pride and progress.
Whichever side of the fence you sit on in that debate, everyone must agree that its subsequent collapse has launched the British into an identity crisis from which they have yet to recover.
But it really isn’t too much to say that if it wasn’t for the channel, we probably wouldn’t have had the time to invent football, tennis, rugby and cricket, let alone parliamentary democracy. We would have been in the same boat as our European neighbours; constantly dealing with the consequences of having vast foreign armies march across our borders at regular intervals throughout our history.
So perhaps when you book your trip with P&O Ferries, you might want to pop out onto the deck and have a look at that grey salty mass of liquid and give it a bit more appreciation than you normally would. After all this is the sea that’s given you Shakespeare, the Beatles, Monty Python, punk and even America.
You cannot say that other nations wouldn’t have done a better job at shaping the modern world, but the fact is they didn’t, and we are where we are; mostly because of this little stretch of water called the English Channel.
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