1887 in the United Kingdom

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria
• Prime Minister – Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
• Parliament – 24th

  Events

• 18 February – National Colliery disaster at Cwtch in the Rhondda: an underground explosion kills thirty.
• 7 March – 18 April – The Times publishes a series of articles on "Parnellism and Crime" quoting letters, subsequently confessed to be forgeries, intended to discredit Charles Stewart Parnell by appearing to show him as implicated in illegal activities, in particular, support for the 1882 Phoenix Park Murders.
• 28 March – Irish Crimes Act suspends trial by jury in Ireland.
• 31 March – St. John Ambulance Brigade.
• 3 May – Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Manchester, is opened by Princess Alexandra.
• 9 May – Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show opens in London.
• 28 May – Udston mining disaster in Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, Scotland: 73 coal miners die in a firedamp explosion at Udston Colliery.
• 17 June – Hammersmith Bridge opens in London.
• 20–21 June – Queen Victoria and the country celebrate a Golden Jubilee, the 50th year of her reign.
• 21 June – Jubilee Plot: Clan na Gael supporters land in Britain from the United States to commit terrorist offences.
• 22 June – Zululand becomes a British colony.
• 5 September – Theatre Royal, Exeter burns down, and 186 people die.
• 1 October – British Empire takes over Balochistan.
• 6 October – the Hōvis process for manufacture of breadmaking flour is patented.
• 6 November – the Association football club Celtic F.C. is formed in Glasgow by Irish Marist Brother Walfrid to help alleviate poverty in the city's East End by raising money for his charity, the Poor Children's Dinner Table.
• 11 November – construction of the Manchester Ship Canal begins.
• 13 November – Bloody Sunday: Police in London clash with radical and Irish nationalist protesters.
• 17 December – English adventurer Thomas Stevens concludes the first circumnavigation by bicycle in Yokohama, having set out on his penny-farthing from San Francisco in 1884.
• 25 December – Glenfiddich single malt Scotch whisky first distilled.

  Undated

• The Hospitals Association establishes the first register of nurses in the UK.
• Sir John Everett Millais' painting Bubbles is acquired for advertising purposes by Pears soap.

  Publications

• Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet.
• H. Rider Haggard's novels She and Allan Quatermain.
• Thomas Hardy's novel The Woodlanders.

  Births

• 10 February – E. V. Rieu, classicist and poet
• 5 March – Herbert Farjeon, man of the theatre
• 9 March – Phil Mead, cricketer
• 5 May – Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury
• 24 May – Mick Mannock, World War I flying ace
• 4 June – Ray Strachey, born Rachel Costelloe, feminist campaigner
• 21 June – Hastings Ismay, army officer
• 22 June – Julian Huxley, biologist
• 3 August – Rupert Brooke, war poet
• 22 August – Walter Citrine, trade unionist
• 31 August – William McMillan, sculptor
• 7 September – Edith Sitwell, poet
• 26 September – Edwin Keppel Bennett, writer
• 26 September – Barnes Wallis, scientist, engineer and inventor
• 11 October – Henry Montgomery Campbell, Bishop of London
• 1 November – L. S. Lowry, painter
• 11 November – Maurice Elvey, born William Folkard, film director
• 17 November – Bernard Montgomery, World War II commander
• 23 November – Boris Karloff, born William Pratt, film actor
• Isabel Emslie Hutton, Scottish nurse in Serbia during World War I and psychiatrist

  Deaths

• 12 January – Stafford Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh, politician
• 22 January – Joseph Whitworth, mechanical engineer
• 10 February – Mrs Henry Wood, novelist
• 13 February – Philip Bourke Marston, poet
• 4 March – Catherine Huggins, actor, singer, director and manager
• 23 April – John Ceiriog Hughes, Welsh poet
• 8 May – Thomas Stevenson, Scottish lighthouse engineer and meteorologist
• 21 May – Sir Horace Jones, architect
• 10 June – Richard Lindon, inventor
• 8 July – John Wright Oakes, landscape painter
• 25 July – Henry Mayhew, writer
• 16 August – Webster Paulson, civil engineer
• 12 October – Dinah Craik, novelist and poet
• 5 December – Richard Lyons, 1st Viscount Lyons, diplomat
• 14 December – William Garrow Lettsom, diplomat, mineralogist and spectroscopist
• 23 December – Adolphus Frederick Alexander Woodford, parson