Events
- 5 January – Prime Minister Winston Churchill arrives in the United States for an official visit and talks with President Harry S. Truman. [2]
- 10 January – An Aer Lingus Douglas DC-3 aircraft on a London–Dublin flight crashes in Wales due to vertical draft in the mountains of Snowdonia, killing twenty passengers and the three crew. [3]
- 16 January – Sooty, Harry Corbett's glove puppet teddy bear, first appears on BBC Television. He would get his own series three years later. [4]
- 30 January – British troops remain in Korea, where they have spent the last eighteen months, after a breakdown of talks aimed at ending the Korean War. [5]
- 1 February – The first TV detector van is commissioned in the UK as the beginning of a clampdown on the estimated 150,000 British households that watch television illegally without a licence. [6]
- 6 February – King George VI dies at Sandringham House aged 56 early that morning. It is revealed that he had been suffering from lung cancer. He is succeeded by his 25-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh who ascends to the throne as Queen Elizabeth II. [7] The new Queen is on a visit to Kenya at the time of her father's death and returns to London the following day. She will be the longest-lived and longest-reigning British monarch with a reign of 70 years.
- 8 February – Queen Elizabeth II is proclaimed Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland at St James's Palace. [7]
- 14–25 February – Great Britain and Northern Ireland compete at the Winter Olympics in Oslo and win one gold medal.
- 15 February – The funeral of King George VI takes place at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. His body has been lying in state in Westminster Hall since 11 February. [8]
- 21 February – Compulsory identity cards, issued during World War II, are abolished. [7]
- 26 February – Prime Minister Winston Churchill announces that the United Kingdom has an atomic bomb. [9]
- 31 March – Computer scientist Alan Turing is convicted of "gross indecency" after admitting to a consensual homosexual relationship in Regina v. Turing and Murray. He consents to undergo oestrogen treatment to avoid imprisonment.
- 29 April – The University of Southampton is chartered, the first post-war university established.
- 2 May – The De Havilland Comet becomes the world's first jet airliner, with a maiden flight from London to Johannesburg.
- 3 May – Newcastle United F.C. win the FA Cup for a record fifth time. Last year's winners retain the trophy with a 1–0 win over Arsenal at Wembley Stadium. The only goal of the game is scored by Chilean-born forward George Robledo, the first foreigner to score in an FA Cup final. [10]
- 21 May – Eastcastle Street robbery: a post office van is held up in the West End of London and £287,000 (worth £8,189,519 in 2019) stolen, Britain's largest post-war robbery up to this date; [11] the thieves are never caught.
- June – Reindeer reintroduced to the Cairngorms of Scotland. [12]
- 1 June – One shilling charge is introduced for prescription drugs dispensed under the National Health Service. [13]
- 5 June – Elizabeth II attends Trooping the Colour for the first time as monarch. She rides a police horse named Winston to and from the ceremony. [14]
- 5 July – The last of the original trams runs in London; people turn out in force to say farewell. [15]
- 19 July–3 August – Great Britain and Northern Ireland compete at the Olympics in Helsinki and win 1 gold, 2 silver and 8 bronze medals.
- 19 July – Len Hutton is appointed as the England cricket team's first professional captain for 65 years. [4]
- 24 July – Somali sailor Mahmood Mattan, 28, is convicted of the murder of pawnbroker Lily Volpert, and sentenced to death at Glamorgan Assizes; his conviction will be quashed 45 years later. [16]
- 16 August – Lynmouth Flood: 34 people killed in a flood at Lynmouth in Devon. Many other people are injured and numerous buildings are damaged. [17]
- 3 September – Mahmood Mattan becomes the last person to be hanged at Cardiff Prison. [18]
- 6 September – Farnborough Airshow DH.110 crash: 31 people are killed when a supersonic jet plane breaks up over the crowd at the Farnborough Airshow. [19]
- 19 September – English film star Charlie Chaplin, sailing to the United Kingdom with his family for the premiere of his film Limelight (London, 16 October), is told that by instruction of J. Edgar Hoover he will be refused re-entry to the United States until he has been investigated by the U.S. Immigration Service. He chooses to remain in Europe. [20]
- 29 September
- The Manchester Guardian prints news, rather than advertisements, on its front page for the first time.
- Racing driver John Cobb, 52, is killed in a speedboat accident on Loch Ness while attempting to set up a world record.
- 3 October – Operation Hurricane: The UK explodes its first atomic bomb in the Monte Bello Islands, Australia. [21]
- 5 October – Tea rationing ends, after thirteen years, as announced by the Government two days earlier. [22]
- 8 October – Harrow and Wealdstone rail crash in North London claims the lives of 108 people. [23]
- 9 October – Knowsley Hall shootings: Lady Derby and her cook are injured, and the butler and under-butler killed, when trainee footman Harold Winstanley fires a Schmeisser pistol at Knowsley Hall in Lancashire. Winstanley flees and is later arrested.
- 19 October
- A small militant Welsh republican group, Y Gweriniaethwyr, make an unsuccessful attempt to blow up a water pipeline leading from the Claerwen dam in mid Wales to Birmingham. [24] The Claerwen reservoir is officially opened on 23 October. [25]
- John Bamford, aged 15, rescues victims of a house fire, and becomes the youngest person to be awarded the George Cross.
- November – Royal College of General Practitioners established.
- 4 November – Queen Elizabeth II opens Parliament for the first time, wearing her tiara, as she hasn't been crowned yet. [26]
- 14 November – The magazine New Musical Express (launched on 7 March) publishes the first UK Singles Chart. [7]
- 25 November – Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap starts its run at the New Ambassadors Theatre in London. It will still be running in London as of 2022, having transferred next door to St Martin's Theatre in 1974. [27]
- 29 November – First GPO pillar box of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II to be erected in Scotland, on the Inch housing estate in Edinburgh, is attacked in protest at its bearing the Royal Cipher of Elizabeth II, considered historically incorrect in Scotland. [28]
- 4–9 December – Great Smog blankets London, causing transport chaos and, it is believed, around 4,000 deaths. [29]
- 10 December – Archer Martin and Richard Synge win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for their invention of partition chromatography". [30]
- 12 December – BBC children's television series Flower Pot Men debuts.
- 16 December – Harold Winstanley, the perpetrator of the Knowsley Hall shootings, is found guilty but insane at Manchester Assizes, and sentenced to detention at Broadmoor Hospital.
- 25 December – The Queen makes her first Christmas speech to the Commonwealth. [31]
- 30 December – An RAF Avro Lancaster bomber crashes in Luqa, Malta, after an engine failure, killing three crew members and a civilian on the ground. [32]
- December – Utility furniture scheme ends. [33]
- Undated – Geoffrey Dummer proposes the integrated circuit. [34]