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If it were still British it would be protected against flooding, and all the electricity lines would be underground.

The thames Barrier is a flood barrier protecting London: http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/homeandleisure/floods/38353.aspx and electricity wires on poles are very rare -- only seen in remote rural areas.

I think you need some political pressure to clean up those power plants then (also, I doubt there's the spare capacity anyway, so it should be in place before new plants are built).

I'm not sure whether it's from the EU or just the UK, but this seems to say 6 of the more polluting power plants in the UK will be / have closed by the end of 2015. The linked PDF shows the worst, producing 3.9GW, is permitted (under older rules) to produce 87ktpa (kilo-tonnes per annum?) of NOx. I've nothing to compare that number with.

This report has some graphs and figures for pollution more generally. Of the 1105kt NOx released in 2010, 336kt was from power generation and 370kt from road transport. Page 13 shows there's been a massive reduction in road transport NOx since 2000.

I think you need some political pressure to clean up those power plants then (also, I doubt there's the spare capacity anyway, so it should be in place before new plants are built).

I'm not sure whether it's from the EU or just the UK, but this seems to say 6 of the more polluting power plants in the UK will be / have closed by the end of 2015. The linked PDF shows the worst, producing 3.9GW, is permitted (under older rules) to produce 87ktpa (kilo-tonnes per annum?) of NOx. I've nothing to compare that number with.

This report has some graphs and figures for pollution more generally. Of the 1105kt NOx released in 2010, 336kt was from power generation and 370kt from road transport. Page 13 shows there's been a massive reduction in road transport NOx since 2000.

There is British food? Besides boiled boar with mint sauce?
http://www.asterix.com/books/albums/asterix-in-britain.html

Sure,

Cucumber sandwiches (using white bread for the visual contrast, I suppose).

Pot pie (not that kind of pot), I think it's the British version of Haggis, you'd best not inquire as to it's individual constituents.

Various strange puddings that really should come with an MSDS.

I think there were more at one time, but the Environment Agency has been working diligently to clean up things.

Property searches used to only include checking title, open planning applications and mining. Only last month did the land registry link up with the Environment Agency to provide flood risk information. It is still quite basic, apparently doing no more than linking a postcode to a situation on this map. Few people read (or are even given) the results of searches, they just rely on their lawyer pointing things out.

Many of the major floods seen in the news here in recent years have been extraordinary stuff, which would be classed as low risk category anyway. There's an article on the BBC talks about that in relation to Cockermouth (yes we do have very silly names for places in Britain), while the #1 comment there has a very important point: land use is extremely significant and isn't factored into the flood risk maps. The flooding a couple of years ago in Hull was actually blamed in large part on people paving their driveways, resulting in massive run-off with minimal water soaking away. This is a massive contributor to flooding, to such an extent that "we have identified areas at tops of hills that are at risk of surface water flooding".

For what it's worth you will have increased premiums if you live in a flood plain. That is, if you thought to ask for flooding cover. Usually if there is extensive damage to a flooded property the insurance company won't pay out if it happens a second time, or only above a massive excess. This doesn't seem to cause a problem when it comes to sell property - unlike cars where you are obliged to state if an insurance company has written off the car (though nobody does, which is why you should always get your own insurer to check for you, though no, nobody does that either).

And some other things...

The UK has a high population density which has some forseeable consequences. Hotel rooms will be small, especially in central London. Trains and busses will be crowded in rush hour - if you don't have to be travelling between 8-9:30am or 4:30-6:30pm, then don't.

If you want oriental food, then Chinatown (Soho), just off Leicester Square and a 3-minute walk from Picadilly Circus, does exactly what it says on the tin.

Set aside 20 quid to have proper Afternoon Tea, 3pm onwards at the Terrace Bar in Harrods department store. Ask the besuited concierges for this specific bar (there are many). Ignore anyone who says Harrods is touristy; you are a tourist, so enjoy it and soak up the atmosphere. Service at Harrods is far better than at Fortnum & Mason, even if the prices match.

Do you like engineering? Break up a tube journey by having a look around St Pancras railway station, a marvel of Victorian ironwork itself, and where the rather swish Eurostar train starts its 200mph journey to Paris. Still engineering based, visit the Thames Barrier, a moving metal marvel which stops London from flooding.

Take the Docklands Light Railway monorail (included in your underground tube train ticket) to East India station and gawp at Telehouse Docklands. Note how British police do not carry pistols. Oh no. If they're going to carry a gun, they carry an assault rifle.

Visit the Grenwich Observatory, home of the GMT zero line and note with amusement that, although us British have given up most of our Empire, we still tell the rest of the world when to wake up and when to go to bed.

Walk past Buckingham Palace but make sure you also walk past St James Palace, only two blocks away, which is much older and has far more history.

Really, really, make sure you take a compact umbrella.

I'm guessing you saw the 'Green' in their name and just thought 'damn hippies'.

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/about/how-we-work/scientific-research

Greenpeace aren't saying we can't use plastic, they're saying that companies can use less polluting materials and processes.

Electrical appliance waste is a serious problem, many of the materials used are extremely toxic and causing serious problems where they're dumped.

That's why Europe has the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive for example:

http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/business/topics/waste/32084.aspx

FTA: There may also have been a slowing of Atlantic circulation during the Little Ice Age, which lasted sporadically from 1300 to about 1850 and created temperatures low enough to freeze the River Thames in London.

If this happened again, could the ice block the Thames Barrier and leave London vulnerable to a tidal surge?

The lead time to protect against this would be many years and the potential cost of the damage immense. If you're a Londoner, how about warning your MP?

London already has a Thames barrier. If sea levels rose steadily over ten years, it would just get gradually enhanced, and so would the other defenses along the coast line.

http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/regions/thame s/323150/335688/341764/341767/?version=1&lang=_e

Allah/Gaia/God been out to get us for years. It's no biggie. Tea, anyone?

The more normal approach is one of "managed retreat".

One example here:
http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/news/1145746? lang=_e&region=Environment%20Agency%20Wales

The Thames Barrier makes sense because it's cost-effective - one relatively small barrier prevents a lot of damage.

The comparison between the UK and NL North Sea coasts is interesting. On much of of the UK's coast there are no sea defences at all, but in Holland the sheer scale of them has to be seen to be believed. I guess that the reason is that people in the UK have a choice (to be flippant - how many people would miss Norfolk?) - one part of the country is tipping into the sea as another part is rising out of it. In Holland it's not quite that simple - if you retreat into "safe" areas you may well end up speaking German.

That said - Holland still suffers from flood problems, such as when rivers from Central Europe carry floodwater in. There's not a lot you can do about that. And somehow, I suspect that moving the Port of Amsterdam and Europoort et al to higher ground isn't going to work.

CHEMISTRY
The Coca-Cola Company of Great Britain, for using advanced technology to convert liquid from the River Thames into Dasani, a transparent form of water, which for precautionary reasons has been made unavailable to consumers.

[...]It goes something like this: take Thames Water from the tap in your factory in Sidcup, Kent; put it through a purification process[...]

The BBC hasn't been a monopoly since 1955, and no, it's not a function of Government, there is no minister for the BBC nor is there a chain of command within government in charge of managing the Beeb. We have agencies, lots of them, but the BBC isn't amongst them.

It's an independent public body incorporated via a Royal Charter. Just because it appears soft-left doesn't mean this is encouraged or engineered by Government, it's much to their annoyance in fact, take the Dr. Kelly affair or their war coverage from last year for example.

I guess I came across as a little condescending and pedantic, but the thing is that Antarctica has a very delicate eco-system that has been largely independent of the rest of the world.

Even trace amounts of metal and pollutants that species in most of parts of the world are unaffected by can cause extreme conditions on things living in the Antarctic. See for yourself.

Also, this is one of the few places to study cosmic radiations, and excessive traffic would mean too much EM interference and would affect such studies.

Which is why I hate it when idiots like this guy do not really know what is it they are doing go there without knowing the imports of their actions. Thats one of the last places untouched by civlization, and where there is so much to learn. Please let it be so for a while.

There's Ironbridge Gorge if you like historical engineering stuff - it's name comes from the cast iron beridge that was built across the gorge in 1779. It was where modern iron-working was developed.
In London, there's the Thames barrier - a major part of London's flood defences, the Science Museum, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the spot that longitude is measured from and where the worlds timezones are based on (any pedants who want to reply to this pointing outthat an average of a collection of atomic clocks throughout the world is now used will get slapped and told to bugger off and stop being such an annoying pedantic twat...) There's also London Open House, which is more of an architecture thing really, and is mostly only for one weekend a year, but they do have events all year round.