1825 in the United Kingdom

Incumbents

• Monarch – George IV
• Prime Minister – Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool
• Parliament – 7th

  Events

• 1 March – a fire destroys the outbound East Indiaman in the Bay of Biscay with the loss of more than 80 lives, but passing ships save over 550.
• 21 March – British première of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 is presented by the Philharmonic Society of London at its Argyll Rooms conducted by Sir George Smart.
• 23 April – royal charter granted to the Geological Society of London.
• 15 June – Work on the new London Bridge, designed by John Rennie, begins.
• 22 June – Cotton Mills Regulation Act establishes a maximum of 12-hour day for children under 16.
• July – England and Wales' dryest July on record, with a rainfall average of 8.2mm; from 14-19 July consecutively, the daytime maxima in London exceed 90 °F.
• 18 August – Scottish adventurer Gregor MacGregor issues a £300,000 loan with 2.5% interest through the London bank of Thomas Jenkins & Company for the fictitious Central American republic of Poyais. His actions lead to the Panic of 1825, the first modern stock market crash, starting in the Bank of England and precipitating the closure of six London banks and sixty country ones in England.
• 15 September – royal charter granted to the Royal Society of Literature.
• 27 September – the world's first modern railway, the Stockton and Darlington Railway, opens with engineer George Stephenson driving the first public train pulled by the steam engine Locomotion No 1.
• 21 October – PS Comet II sinks off Gourock in the Firth of Clyde with the loss of 62 lives.
• 10 November – royal charter granted to the Van Diemen's Land Company.

  Ongoing

• Anglo-Ashanti war
• First Burmese War

  Undated

• The first horse-drawn omnibuses established in London.
• A new Combination Act makes Trades unions legal according to narrowly defined principles.
• Reconstruction of Buckingham Palace by architect John Nash.
• Michael Faraday isolates benzene.
• Cox's Orange Pippin apple cultivar first grown, at Colnbrook in Buckinghamshire by horticulturist and retired brewer Richard Cox.
• At about this date London is estimated to overtake Peking as the world's largest city.

  Publications

• Walter Scott's novels The Betrothed and The Talisman.
• First publication of Samuel Pepys' Diary, edited by Lord Braybrooke from the transcription by Rev. John Smith.

  Births

• 14 March – Elizabeth Anne Finn, writer
• March – William McGonagall, Scottish doggerel 'poet and tragedian'
• 24 April – R. M. Ballantyne, Scottish writer of juvenile fiction
• 1 May – Eleanor Vere Boyle, watercolourist and illustrator
• 4 May – Thomas Henry Huxley, biologist
• 8 May – George Bruce Malleson, officer and author
• 9 May – James Collinson, Pre-Raphaelite painter
• 24 June – William Henry Smith, politician and founder of stationers W H Smith
• 13 November – Charles Frederick Worth, couturier

  Deaths

• 6 March – Samuel Parr, schoolmaster
• 27 June – Edward Pigott, astronomer
• 20 August – William Waldegrave, 1st Baron Radstock, Governor of Newfoundland
• 25 October – David Bogue, nonconformist leader