Record and Recall: A Cretan Memoir (1988) details an episode in his war experiences when he escaped being captured by German paratroopers who invaded the island of Crete where he helped to staff a radar station in 1941.

He also helped to introduce, and make accessible, important psychological thinkers in the area of language, identity, and society, from the American George Kelly to the Russian Lev Vygotsky.

[12][13] Published in 1957, one of Britton's first works was a carefully selected and graded four part anthology of verse for juniors which both attested to his passion for poetry and his desire to champion the creative aspects of English.

[3][14] Britton returned to this, his foremost pleasure, at the end of his life by gathering together all the verse he had written over more than fifty years and publishing The Flight-Path of My Words: Poems 1940–1992 (1994), his final book.

[9] In between, Britton also academically explored the importance of poems and stories in people's lives, through his selected essays in Prospect and Retrospect (1982),[15] and with his penultimate book, Literature in Its Place (1993).

His commitment to helping initiate and sustain an international conversation among teachers of English began with his role as a member of the British delegation to the Dartmouth Conference of 1966.

[17] In 1971, at the University of York, Britton was a key supporter of the first grassroots International Conference with its call for language and writing across the curriculum.