England

England is one of the four constituent parts of the United Kingdom, the others being Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The capital city has been London since William I had himself crowned there in 1066. The population of the country is around 56,000,000, while the other three parts of the U.K. together have only about 11,500,000. It is divided into areas of land called counties, but local government now has various forms of council area, some within counties, and others independent of them. The Channel Islands and the Isle of Man are not part of the United Kingdom, and therefore are not represented in Parliament, whereas every part of England is. The significance of this, from a Bahá'í viewpoint is that the National Spiritual Assembly has asked the Bahá'í Council for England to take overall responsibility for both of these areas. The language of every part of the country is English, except that in Cornwall, Cornish only finally ceded to English in the late eighteenth century. The significance of this is that many Cornish people do not consider themselves as "English". England also has a small Romany population, who call themselves Romichal, and who probably arrived in the late fifteenth century. There have been Jews in England since the mid-seventeenth century, following their earlier expulsion in 1290 C.E. All other minority groups arrived in the twentieth century, from the West Indies, south Asia, the Far East and other areas.

Abdu'l-Baha came to England on two separate visits to Europe, and once travelled up to Scotland to give talks there. Early centres of Bahá'í presence were London, Manchester and Bournemouth. When the first National Spiritual Assembly was formed, the majority of the believers lived in England, and it was not until the Plan of 1944-1950 that Local Spiritual Assemblies were formed in the other parts of the United Kingdom.

In around the year 2000, the Universal House of Justice asked the National Spiritual Assembly to break up the more rural Local Spiritual Assembly areas so that towns and areas of countryside would be, in time, represented by Local Assemblies for a natural area of settlement, rather than large administrative constructs. The number of Local Assemblies dropped, as believers in the countryside found themselves separated into different areas, each designated for a Local Spiritual Assembly in the future. In the larger conurbations, there are Local Spiritual Assemblies organised for each London Borough or Metropolitan Borough (excepting outlying rural areas). When clusters came into force, the Greater Manchester cluster was the first to have a Programme of Growth, followed, one week later, by Greater London. By 2020, every cluster in England had a Programme of Growth except Dorset. Six clusters, all at geographical extremities of England, were working towards the second milestone, with another ten clusters around that milestone, but some considerable way off the third milestone. Eleven clusters were working towards the third milestone. Greater Manchester and Greater London are considered to have reached the third milestone.