18. Industrial and agricultural districts in great britain

England is a highly developed industrial country. London is the biggest city. It is important for products of all kinds including food, instrument engineering, electrical and electronic engineering, clothing, furniture and printing. It has some heavy engineering plants and several leading research establishments. London is a great port with many docks. It is also the centre of commerce.North-west of London, in the midland counties (the Midlands) is a very important industrial district which is known as the “Black country”. In Birmingham, the centre of this area, and in the manufacturing towns nearby, various goods are produced: machine tools, tubes, domestic metalware, rubber products, etc. The largest coal and iron fields in Britain are located in the Midlands. Further north is Manchester, one of the main centres for electrical and heavy engineering and for the production of a wide range of goods including computers, electronic equipment, petrochemicals, dye-stuffs and pharmaceuticals. The Manchester Ship Canal links Manchester with Liverpool, one of Britain’s leading seaports.East of Manchester is the city of Sheffield, well-known for its manufacture of high quality steels, tools and cutlery. A short railway journey to the north-east will take you from Manchester to Bradford, the commercial centre of the wool trade.Further north is Newcastle situated on the North Sea coast, a city famous for its shipbuilding yards and its export of coal.In Scotland, the richest part is that of the Lowlands. Here there are coal and iron fields. Glasgow is the largest city, seaport and trading centre of Scotland. North-east Scotland is now the centre of off-shore oil and gas industries.Although Britain is a densely populated, industrialized country, agriculture is still one of its most important industries. Dairying is most common in the west of England, where the wetter climate encourages the growth of good grass. Sheep , and cattle are reared in the hilly and moorland areas of northern and south-western England. Its best farmland lies in the south-eastern plains.The south of England is rural, with many fertile valleys and numerous hedges’ dividing the well-cultivated fields and pastures.The south-eastern coast is well-known for its picturesque scenery and mild climate and a number of popular resorts. On the southern coast of England there are many large ports, among them: Southampton, Portsmouth, Plymouth.

12. Thomas Gainsborough

Thomas Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, in 1727, the son of John Gainsborough. He soon evinced a marked inclination for drawing and in 1740 his father sent him to London to study art. He stayed in London for eight years, he also became familiar with the Flemish tradition of painting, which was highly prized by London art dealers at that time. In 1750 Gainsborough moved to Ipswich where his professional career began in earnest. In October 1759 he moved to Bath. In Bath he became a much sought-after and fashionable artist, portraying the aristocracy, wealthy merchants, artist and men of letters. As a self-taught artist he did not make any traditional grand tour or the ritual journey to Italy but relied on his own remarkable instinct in painting. The particular discovery of Gainsborough was the creation of a form of art in which the sitters and the background merge into a single entity. The landscape is not kept in the background but in most cases man and nature are fused in a single whole through the atmospheric harmony of mood. In the portrait of Robert Andrews and Mary his Wife, for example the beauty of green English summer is communicated to the viewer through the sense of well-being and delight which the atmosphere visibly creates in the sitters. Emphasis is nearly always placed on the season in both the landscapes and the portraits, from the time of Gainsborough s early works till his late maturity. It is because his art does not easily fall within a well-defined theoretical system that it became a forerunner of the Romantic Movement. Gainsborough neither had not desired pupils but his art ideologically and technically entirely different from that of his rival Reynolds had a considerable influence on the artists of the English school who followed him. The landscapes especially those of his late manner ,anticipate Constable, the marine paintings Turner. His output includes about eight hundred portraits and more than two hundred landscapes.