Home › Landforms › Islands & Archipelagos
Great Britain
Europe's largest island, cradle of an empire and the industrial age
An island off the northwest coast of continental Europe came, improbably, to shape much of the modern world. Great Britain is the largest island in Europe and the ninth-largest on Earth, home to England, Scotland and Wales and to the better part of seventy million people. From its damp green countryside and rugged Highlands emerged the parliamentary government, the Industrial Revolution and a language now spoken across the globe, an outsized legacy for a landmass smaller than many a country.
Great Britain covers about 209,331 square kilometres, separated from the European mainland by the narrow English Channel, less than 34 kilometres wide at the Strait of Dover. Its landscape tilts from the lowland plains and chalk downs of the south and east to the mountains of the north and west, culminating in Ben Nevis in the Scottish Highlands at 1,345 metres. Shaped by Ice Age glaciers and a long, indented coastline, the island enjoys a mild, wet maritime climate moderated by the Gulf Stream. It became an island only some eight thousand years ago, when rising seas drowned the land bridge to the continent.
The island has been settled and invaded in turn by Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans, each leaving their mark on its language and landscape. From it grew the United Kingdom and, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the largest empire in history, projected from a small island onto a quarter of the globe. The first factories of the Industrial Revolution rose in its northern towns, transforming how humanity works and lives. Today Great Britain remains a densely populated, intensely historic place, its identity still shaped by its insular geography even after the recent rupture of leaving the European Union.