I've lived in England all my life aside from several years in Wales and it's interesting how contrived the accent a lot of foreigners associate with us actually

I've lived in England all my life aside from several years in Wales and it's interesting how contrived the accent a lot of foreigners associate with us actually is. There's a lot of natural variation in our accents (they can change from town to town over the course of a dozen miles in extreme cases) but RP, 'posh English' or 'BBC English' was a product of 20th century radio broadcasting based on the natural accent of the south-eastern upper classes and somewhat controversially declared to be the standard pronunciation for British English. The result of this is that a few of my friends and I have very similar sounding accents despite our families being from other ends of the country and having very different 'default' accents; it's entirely down to our respective mothers telling us to 'speak properly' every time we'd drop our Ts or show other 'common' habits of speech as kids!