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. 1
   Winston Churchill

   Wartime prime minister, Nobel laureate in literature and the man the BBC's 2002 public poll put first.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Isambard Kingdom Brunel

   Victorian engineer behind the Great Western Railway, the SS Great Britain and the Clifton Suspension Bridge.
   926pts
3. 3
   Diana, Princess of Wales

   The most photographed woman of her era, remembered for landmine and AIDS campaigning.
   661pts
4. 4
   John Lennon

   Beatle, songwriter and the most politically outspoken member of the most successful band in history.
   661pts
5. 5
   Queen Victoria

   Monarch for 63 years, giving her name to an era and an empire at its widest extent.
   661pts
6. 6
   David Attenborough

   Broadcaster and naturalist whose series taught several generations what the planet looks like.
   600pts
7. 7
   Elizabeth I

   Tudor queen whose 45-year reign covered the Armada and the first English theatre boom.
   600pts
8. 8
   Oliver Cromwell

   Civil war general and Lord Protector — the only commoner ever to rule England.
   600pts
9. 9
   Isaac Newton

   Mathematician and physicist who set out the laws of motion and universal gravitation.
   529pts
10. 10
    Horatio Nelson

    Admiral who won at Trafalgar in 1805 and died in the moment of victory.
    448pts
11. 11
    William Shakespeare

    Playwright and poet whose 39 plays still dominate world theatre four centuries on.
    353pts
12. 12
    Emmeline Pankhurst

    Suffragette leader whose militant campaign won British women the vote.
    353pts
13. 13
    Michael Faraday

    Self-taught experimentalist who discovered electromagnetic induction and made electricity usable.
    353pts
14. 14
    Alan Turing

    Mathematician who broke Enigma at Bletchley Park and laid the foundations of computing.
    240pts
15. 15
    Ernest Shackleton

    Antarctic explorer who lost his ship and still brought every one of his 27 men home alive.
    240pts
16. 16
    Charles Darwin

    Naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection reorganised biology.
    240pts
17. 17
    Florence Nightingale

    Founder of modern nursing, whose Crimean sanitation reforms cut death rates sharply.
    240pts
18. 18
    Ada Lovelace

    Mathematician who wrote the first algorithm intended for a machine, a century before computers existed.
    0pts

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