From the Armistice and the first vote for women through the World Wars and Churchill's finest hour, the Labour landslide and the welfare state, the end of empire and the Windrush generation, Elizabeth II and Suez, the Troubles and Thatcherism, devolution and the Good Friday Agreement, Brexit and Covid, to the death of the Queen and the New Carolean age. Slide across the decades to read the major events of the British twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
At 11 a.m. on 11 November the guns fall silent on the Western Front; Britain has lost roughly 723,000 dead. In February the Representation of the People Act gave the vote to all men over 21 and to women householders over 30 — a tripled electorate of 21 million.
From the Armistice and the first vote for women through the World Wars and Churchill's finest hour, the Labour landslide and the welfare state, the end of empire and the Windrush generation, Elizabeth II and Suez, the Troubles and Thatcherism, devolution and the Good Friday Agreement, Brexit and Covid, to the death of the Queen and the New Carolean age. Slide across the decades to read the major events of the British twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
At 11 a.m. on 11 November the guns fall silent on the Western Front; Britain has lost roughly 723,000 dead. In February the Representation of the People Act gave the vote to all men over 21 and to women householders over 30 — a tripled electorate of 21 million.
After two years of guerrilla war fought by Michael Collins's IRA, Lloyd George's government signs a treaty granting dominion status to twenty-six Irish counties as the Irish Free State; six Protestant-majority counties of the north remain in the United Kingdom.
On 4 May the Trades Union Congress calls out 1.7 million workers in support of the locked-out coal miners. For nine days the country runs on volunteer labour and military supply convoys; the strike collapses without concessions.
After 326 days as king, Edward VIII abdicates on 11 December to marry the twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson. The crown passes to his shy younger brother Albert, who reigns as George VI.
After the fall of France in June, the evacuation of 338,000 troops from the beaches of Dunkirk, and Churchill's accession as prime minister on 10 May, Britain faces Nazi Germany alone. Through the summer and autumn the Luftwaffe is defeated in the Battle of Britain; through the autumn and winter the cities endure the Blitz.
VE Day on 8 May celebrates the defeat of Nazi Germany. In the general election in July the British public rejects Churchill and gives Clement Attlee's Labour Party a 145-seat majority on a manifesto of nationalisation, full employment, and a national health service.
On 15 August India becomes independent under Jawaharlal Nehru; on 14 August Pakistan is founded under Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The partition of British India displaces perhaps fifteen million people and kills up to a million in religious violence.
On 5 July the National Health Service comes into being, free at the point of use for all British residents. Three weeks earlier, on 22 June, the SS Empire Windrush docks at Tilbury with 492 passengers from the West Indies, ushering in the first wave of post-war Commonwealth migration to Britain.
On 6 February King George VI dies in his sleep at Sandringham. His twenty-five-year-old daughter Elizabeth, on tour in Kenya, returns home as queen. She is crowned in Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953 — the first coronation televised live.
In a secret pact with France and Israel, Anthony Eden's government invades Egypt to retake the Suez Canal nationalised by Nasser. American financial pressure forces a humiliating withdrawal within a week. Eden resigns; the illusion of independent British great-power status collapses.
After two years of escalating sectarian violence — Catholic civil-rights marches, Protestant counter-attacks, the burning of Bombay Street in Belfast — Harold Wilson's government deploys troops on the streets of Belfast and Londonderry in August. The Troubles have begun.
On 1 January, under Edward Heath's Conservative government, the United Kingdom enters the EEC alongside Denmark and Ireland. Two earlier applications had been vetoed by Charles de Gaulle. A 1975 referendum confirms membership by two to one.
After the Winter of Discontent — strikes that left rubbish uncollected and the dead unburied — the Conservatives win the May election. Margaret Thatcher, the first woman to lead a major British party, becomes the first to lead a British government.
After Argentina invades the Falkland Islands on 2 April, a British task force sails 8,000 miles south to retake them. Ten weeks of fighting at sea, in the air, and on the islands end with the Argentine surrender at Port Stanley on 14 June.
After eighteen years of Conservative government, Tony Blair's reformed New Labour wins a 179-seat majority — the largest in any postwar election. Within months referendums in Scotland and Wales approve devolved parliaments at Edinburgh and assemblies at Cardiff.
On 10 April, after two years of secret talks chaired by the American senator George Mitchell, the British and Irish governments, the SDLP, Sinn Féin, the UUP, and most of the loyalist parties sign an agreement at Stormont. Power-sharing, paramilitary decommissioning, and constitutional reform end thirty years of war.
On 23 June, in a referendum called by David Cameron to settle Conservative divisions, 17.4 million British voters (51.9 per cent) choose to leave the European Union. Cameron resigns the next morning; the pound falls eight per cent overnight.
At 11 p.m. on 31 January, after a delay of three and a half years and the collapse of two governments, the United Kingdom formally leaves the European Union — the first member ever to depart. A transitional period and a thin trade deal end the year in deadline negotiations on Christmas Eve.
On 8 September Queen Elizabeth II dies at Balmoral aged 96, after a reign of 70 years and 214 days — the longest in British history. Her seventy-three-year-old son Charles accedes as Charles III, the first new monarch in living memory for most of the population.