Megan Stalter as Jessica Salmon and Will Sharpe as Felix Remen
Beyoncé and Jay-Z are planning a £7m Cotswolds estate, Angelina Jolie has been spotted house-hunting in London and Johnny Depp is reportedly settling into life in the English countryside. But it’s not just pop stars and Hollywood celebrities who want to move to Britain: applications from ordinary Americans for British citizenship have surged, rising by 40% in the final quarter of 2024 compared with the same period a year earlier.
The increase is part of a wider trend that has seen record numbers of US nationals seeking to put down permanent roots in the UK. And whereas for the very wealthy a British property may be a retreat rather than a permanent move, for thousands of ordinary Americans, the decision is about more than bricks and mortar. It is about making Britain home.
If you are one of them, you may find yourself surprised. We imagine ourselves as cousins. We speak the same language. And yet, as when a bride and a groom’s families come together, what at first seems familiar can feel awkwardly unfamiliar. You will quickly discover that everyday words and gestures carry different meanings across the threshold. What counts as polite to one may feel like overstepping to the other; what seems warm in one family may feel excessive or clumsy in another household.
The same holds when Americans and Britons meet in everyday life. The assumption of a “shared tongue” conceals a thousand little differences in custom, ritual, and nuance.
You may already know the obvious ones: for example, a trunk is a boot, pants are underwear, a rubber is not an eraser, and so on. But beyond vocabulary, it is the background habits – such as the way small talk is handled, the way praise is given, the way silence is held – that expose these two cultural families as different.
I notice this myself when I spend time with Americans. They often point out to me, quite directly, that I “have a sense of humour.” No one in Britain has ever told me that. Over here, humour is assumed, ambient, woven into the cultural air we breathe. It is not labelled because to label it would be to break the spell, to draw unnecessary attention to what is obvious. For my American colleagues, though, naming the quality is a way of affirming it, making it visible, offering praise as an explicit gesture. The exchange reveals less about whether I am funny than about the different cultural grounds on which humour is cultivated and recognised. When Americans first point out my “humour,” I find it unsettling. You may feel the same if a character trait is singled out, until you remember this is cultural, not personal.
Every encounter we have outside of our immediate family is also an encounter of different cultural fields. Each person brings into the room a background of assumptions, unspoken habits, expectations about how intimacy is signalled, how authority is handled, how silence should be interpreted. What is obvious to you may be invisible to the other. This is the ground against which we make meaning. When that ground differs, even subtly, the whole picture can shift.
When you move to the UK, you are not simply swapping a zip code for a postcode, or queuing in a different passport line. You are entering a new cultural ground, one where understatement carries weight, where irony shades conversation, where emotional intensity is often cloaked rather than declared. Conversely, when Britons enter American circles, they may find the directness refreshing, or overwhelming, or both. What one calls “straightforward honesty” another may interpret as overbearing. What one assumes to be “warm interest” may strike the other as intrusive. The invisible ground is where these mismatches live.
So, can we map the differences? The anthropologist Edward T Hall distinguished between high-context and low-context cultures. Britain, with its long reliance on shared codes and understatement, leans towards high context: much is implied, less is said. The US is more low context: speech makes explicit what is intended, leaving less to be guessed. Psychologist John Berry, meanwhile, describes the different ways newcomers acculturate. So, as an American in Britain, you will find yourself somewhere along the following paths: there is Assimilation, when individuals adopt the cultural norms of a host culture over their original one; Separation, when individuals reject the host culture in favour of preserving their culture of origin; Integration, when individuals adopt aspects of the host culture while maintaining their own; and Marginalisation, when individuals feel disconnected from both.
Between Britain and America, the temptation is to believe that integration is effortless, because both speak English. Yet it is precisely the closeness that can make the differences sharper, more unexpected, like a word spoken in the same language that suddenly means something else. The writer and director Lena Dunham explored exactly this in her recent semi-autobiographical Netflix series Too Much. Its comedy turns on the cultural mis-steps of an American woman in London, and while it may not be to every taste, it illustrates how the humour in these encounters often lies in the clash of assumptions.
So, how do you learn to live on this new cultural ground? If you are an American in Britain, learn to attune to what is not spoken and listen for irony rather than affirmation. If you are British among Americans, prepare to adjust to having qualities named aloud, to receiving praise without irony, to a culture of affirmation that can feel like performance until you learn to take it seriously. Over time, you may acquire a hybrid ground, shifting between registers depending on who is in the room, carrying both cultural families within you.
The number of Americans applying for British citizenship is therefore more than a dry statistic. It represents thousands of small negotiations of humour, of greeting, of silence and speech, of when to look away and when to smile. And just to be clear, this is not about immigration policy. Wealthy celebrity imports rarely trouble the flag-waving debates. What matters here is not nationality at the border, but the invisible cultural ground that makes meaning possible. When you step on to that ground, the challenge is not just learning how to live in Britain, but how to live between cultures, where the unfamiliar becomes another version of home.
Philippa Perry’s Ask Philippa advice column is on Substack