Social Classes of Britain In Britain the class system survived because its flexibility.

It has always been possible to buy, marry or work your way up, so your children belong to a higher social class than you do. There are three classes: The upper class in Britain is statistically very small and consists of the peerage (British nobility), gentry (noble) and hereditary landowners. The middle class is any class of people in the middle of a societal hierarchy. People, who fall socio-economically between the working class and the upper class, who typically have
had a good education, own a family house, and hold a managerial or professional post. The working class is a term used in in ordinary conversation to describe those employed in lower jobs (as measured by skill, education and lower incomes), often extending to those in unemployment or otherwise possessing below-average incomes. Working classes are mainly found in industrialized economies and in urban areas of non-industrialized economies.

All these classes have different sets of attitudes and daily habits. They tend to eat different food at different times of day. For urban working class tea is the evening meal, eaten as soon as people get home from work. For other classes, it means a cup of tea and a snack at around four oclock. Supper is the usual word for the evening meal among most people who do not call it tea. Dinner is used for something rather grander and eaten comparatively late at around eight oclock. They like to talk about different topics using different styles and accents of English; they enjoy different pastimes and sports. Cricket for example largely confined to the middle class. Lawn tennis, golf, rugby, polo and equestrian sports are popular pastime activities for the upper class. They have different values about what things in life are most important or how to behave as well as they go to different kinds of school. In Britain it is not wealth which determines someones class. When we look at someones clothes, car or bank balance we cannot decide for sure which class the person belongs to. The most obvious sign is when a person starts to speak; giving the listener clues to the speakers attitudes and interests (both of which indicative of class). If the person speaks standard British English which is used in public speaking, radio and television news broadcasts, books and newspapers most probably belongs to a higher class. On the other hand working-class people use lots of words and grammar forms in their everyday speech, which are regarded as non-standard. Nevertheless, nearly everyone is capable of using Standard English when the situation demands it. The persons own accent can also indicate his or her class. Most people cannot change this convincingly according to the situation.

The most prestigious accent is known as Received Pronunciation (RP), which is the combination of Standard English spoken with an RP accent that is usually meant when people talk about BBC English or Oxford English or Queens English. But many people speak with a geographically limited accent as well. Working class people are traditionally proud of their class membership and would not wish to belong to any other class. In Britain there is a phenomenon known as inverted snobbery whereby middle-class people try to adopt working-class values and habits because they believe that working-class people are more honest than the middle-classes. The unofficial segregation of the classes in Britain has become less rigid than it was. People with strong accent are no longer prohibited from most high-status jobs, radio or television presenter jobs for that reason only. In general, the different classes mix more easily with each other than they used to. There are more and more working-class people who are house owners (in the middle years of the 20th century, whether you owned or rented a house was a marker of class), and who do traditionally middle-class jobs. The lower and the middle classes have drawn closer to each other in their attitudes.

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_class James Odriscoll: Britain the country and its people (Oxford).