The 18 Greatest Britons of All Time

Engineers, monarchs, codebreakers and campaigners, thrown into one argument. Five centuries of candidates and only one first place.

1

Winston Churchill

Wartime prime minister, Nobel laureate in literature and the man the BBC's 2002 public poll put first.

1000pts

2

Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Victorian engineer behind the Great Western Railway, the SS Great Britain and the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

926pts

3

Diana, Princess of Wales

The most photographed woman of her era, remembered for landmine and AIDS campaigning.

661pts

4

John Lennon

Beatle, songwriter and the most politically outspoken member of the most successful band in history.

661pts

5

Queen Victoria

Monarch for 63 years, giving her name to an era and an empire at its widest extent.

661pts

6

David Attenborough

Broadcaster and naturalist whose series taught several generations what the planet looks like.

600pts

7

Elizabeth I

Tudor queen whose 45-year reign covered the Armada and the first English theatre boom.

600pts

8

Oliver Cromwell

Civil war general and Lord Protector — the only commoner ever to rule England.

600pts

9

Isaac Newton

Mathematician and physicist who set out the laws of motion and universal gravitation.

529pts

10

Horatio Nelson

Admiral who won at Trafalgar in 1805 and died in the moment of victory.

448pts

11

William Shakespeare

Playwright and poet whose 39 plays still dominate world theatre four centuries on.

353pts

12

Emmeline Pankhurst

Suffragette leader whose militant campaign won British women the vote.

353pts

13

Michael Faraday

Self-taught experimentalist who discovered electromagnetic induction and made electricity usable.

353pts

14

Alan Turing

Mathematician who broke Enigma at Bletchley Park and laid the foundations of computing.

240pts

15

Ernest Shackleton

Antarctic explorer who lost his ship and still brought every one of his 27 men home alive.

240pts

16

Charles Darwin

Naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection reorganised biology.

240pts

17

Florence Nightingale

Founder of modern nursing, whose Crimean sanitation reforms cut death rates sharply.

240pts

18

Ada Lovelace

Mathematician who wrote the first algorithm intended for a machine, a century before computers existed.

106pts