Just as there are a few nicknames for the U.S. ("Uncle Sam", "Columbia", "Yankee Land"), are there nicknames for England, or the U.K. for that matter?

This may look like General Reference, but I've googled "list of nicknames for England", "list of nicknames for the United Kingdom", and all I got was "list of city nicknames in the United Kingdom" or "list of nicknames for counties of the United Kingdom" and even "list of names and nicknames for the English". I'm not looking for nicknames for the English or the British, though. My question is: Are there nicknames for England (or the United Kingdom)? Where and when did they originate?

Solution 1:

There is the British Bulldog, which is a real breed of dog which is often used to symbolise Britain - this Pitt Nutter blog site has many illustrations

This Wikipedia page on National Personifications features Britannia side-by-side with Uncle Sam.

It also has this recruiting poster showing John Bull - a much less familiar version than the Kitchener one mentioned by @sjy

Solution 2:

Off the top of my head (I'm not from the UK), I can think of blighty which is defined by the online Oxford dictionary as:

An informal term for Britain or England, used by soldiers of the First and Second World Wars.

It is often used as old blighty, as in the song Take me back to dear old Blighty. It's origin according to the same OD link is

first used by soldiers in the Indian army; Anglo-Indian alteration of Urdu bilāyatī, wilāyatī 'foreign, European', from Arabic wilāyat, wilāya 'dominion, district'.

As you can see from this NGram (run on British English), the term had its heyday at the time of the first world war but it is still in use today:

Another option is Albion. This is not a nickname however, it is more of an archaic name and tends to be used with more reverence than familiarity. I have never heard it used in speech but I have read it often enough. According to Wikipedia, its etymology is

The Brittonic name for the island, Latinized as Albiō and Hellenized as Ἀλβίων, derives from the Proto-Celtic nasal stem *Albi̯iū (oblique *Albiion-) and survived in Old Irish as Albu, genitive Albann, originally referring to Britain as a whole, but later restricted to northern Britain/Scotland (giving the modern Scottish Gaelic name for Scotland, Alba). The root, *albiio- also found in Gaulish and Galatian albio- "world" and Welsh elfydd (Old Welsh elbid) "earth, world, land, country, district", and may be related to other European and Mediterranean toponyms such as Alpes and Albania. It has two possible etymologies: either *albho-, a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "white" (perhaps in reference to the white southern shores of the island, though Celtic linguist Xavier Delamarre argued that it originally meant "the world above, the visible world", in opposition to "the world below", i.e., the underworld in Celtic religion), or *alb-, Proto-Indo-European for "hill".