Southern England

The half of England where power, money and population have concentrated for a thousand years. The south was Wessex, the kingdom that survived the Danes and became England, and London has been the capital since the Norman conquest confirmed Westminster as the seat of government. Its wealth came first from wool exported through the Cinque Ports and East Anglian cloth towns, then from the City's finance and the empire's trade, and it never industrialised in the northern sense - which is why it emerged from the twentieth century with its economic base intact. Oxford and Cambridge, founded in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, held a near monopoly on English higher education until the nineteenth. The dialect of the southeast became received pronunciation and the standard written language, for the same reason Parisian French did. London now generates a disproportionate share of national output and draws population from everywhere else, and the resulting imbalance is among the widest between regions of any large European country. Housing cost is the region's central political problem. Stonehenge, Canterbury and Bath are World Heritage sites. The region holds around thirty million people including London's nine million. Its climate is drier and warmer than the north. The Home Counties commuter belt extends far beyond the capital. Portsmouth and Plymouth were the navy's principal bases. Kew Gardens, the Tower of London and Greenwich are World Heritage sites. The Thames Barrier protects the capital from surge tides and is raised more often each decade. Brighton and the south coast resorts grew with the railways.

• Existed: 871 CE – present
• Type: Entity