# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published August 18, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-18-greatest-britons-of-all-time*

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## Current results (4 votes)

1. **Winston Churchill** — 50% (2 votes · score 1000/1000)
   Wartime prime minister, Nobel laureate in literature and the man the BBC's 2002 public poll put first.
2. **Isambard Kingdom Brunel** — 50% (2 votes · score 926/1000)
   Victorian engineer behind the Great Western Railway, the SS Great Britain and the Clifton Suspension Bridge.
3. **Diana, Princess of Wales** — 0% (0 votes · score 661/1000)
   The most photographed woman of her era, remembered for landmine and AIDS campaigning.
4. **John Lennon** — 0% (0 votes · score 661/1000)
   Beatle, songwriter and the most politically outspoken member of the most successful band in history.
5. **Queen Victoria** — 0% (0 votes · score 661/1000)
   Monarch for 63 years, giving her name to an era and an empire at its widest extent.
6. **David Attenborough** — 0% (0 votes · score 600/1000)
   Broadcaster and naturalist whose series taught several generations what the planet looks like.
7. **Elizabeth I** — 0% (0 votes · score 600/1000)
   Tudor queen whose 45-year reign covered the Armada and the first English theatre boom.
8. **Oliver Cromwell** — 0% (0 votes · score 600/1000)
   Civil war general and Lord Protector — the only commoner ever to rule England.
9. **Isaac Newton** — 0% (0 votes · score 529/1000)
   Mathematician and physicist who set out the laws of motion and universal gravitation.
10. **Horatio Nelson** — 0% (0 votes · score 448/1000)
   Admiral who won at Trafalgar in 1805 and died in the moment of victory.
11. **William Shakespeare** — 0% (0 votes · score 353/1000)
   Playwright and poet whose 39 plays still dominate world theatre four centuries on.
12. **Emmeline Pankhurst** — 0% (0 votes · score 353/1000)
   Suffragette leader whose militant campaign won British women the vote.
13. **Michael Faraday** — 0% (0 votes · score 353/1000)
   Self-taught experimentalist who discovered electromagnetic induction and made electricity usable.
14. **Alan Turing** — 0% (0 votes · score 240/1000)
   Mathematician who broke Enigma at Bletchley Park and laid the foundations of computing.
15. **Ernest Shackleton** — 0% (0 votes · score 240/1000)
   Antarctic explorer who lost his ship and still brought every one of his 27 men home alive.
16. **Charles Darwin** — 0% (0 votes · score 240/1000)
   Naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection reorganised biology.
17. **Florence Nightingale** — 0% (0 votes · score 240/1000)
   Founder of modern nursing, whose Crimean sanitation reforms cut death rates sharply.
18. **Ada Lovelace** — 0% (0 votes · score 106/1000)
   Mathematician who wrote the first algorithm intended for a machine, a century before computers existed.

Tags: british, all-time