1896 in the United Kingdom

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria
• Prime Minister – Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
• Parliament – 26th

  Events

• January – Fourth Anglo-Ashanti War: British redcoats enter the Ashanti capital, Kumasi, and Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh I is deposed.
• 2 January – the Jameson Raid comes to an end, as Jameson surrenders to the Boers.
• 6 January – Cecil Rhodes resigns as Premier of Cape Colony over the Jameson Raid.
• 10 January – American-born Birt Acres demonstrates his film projector, the Kineopticon, the first in Britain, to the Lyonsdown Photographic Club in New Barnet, the first film show to an audience in the U.K.
• 14 January – Acres demonstrates his Kineopticon to the Royal Photographic Society at the Queen's Hall in London.
• 28 January
• * In an underground explosion at Tylorstown Colliery, Rhondda, 57 miners are killed.
• * Walter Arnold of Kent receives the first speeding conviction for driving in excess of the contemporary speed limit of 2 mph.
• 20 February – in London:
• * Robert W. Paul demonstrates his film projector, the Theatrograph, at the Alhambra Theatre.
• * The Lumiere Brothers first project their films in Britain, at the Empire Theatre of Varieties, Leicester Square.
• 12 March – Salisbury orders a military campaign to combat increasing French influence in the Sudan.
• 6 April – 15 April – Great Britain and Ireland compete at the Olympics and win 2 gold, 3 silver and 2 bronze medals.
• 6 April – the Snowdon Mountain Railway commences public operation; however, a derailment leading to one fatality causes services to be suspended for a year.
• 16 April – the National Trust acquires its first building for preservation, and its first property in England, Alfriston Clergy House in East Sussex.
• 4 May – Daily Mail newspaper founded.
• 8 May – cricket: Yorkshire sets a still-standing County Championship record when they accumulate an innings total of 887 against Warwickshire.
• 18–20 May – Newlyn riots: protests by fishermen at Newlyn, Cornwall, against those from Lowestoft and elsewhere fishing on Sabbath, leading to military intervention.
• 7 June – Mahdist War: British and Egyptian victory at the Battle of Ferkeh.
• 12 June – Jack Hearne sets a record for the earliest date of taking 100 wickets. It is equalled by Charlie Parker in 1931.
• July – law requiring a man to walk in front of moving cars waving a red flag is repealed.
• 26 July – 1 August: International Socialist Workers and Trade Union Congress held in London.
• 17 August
• * Bridget Driscoll becomes the first person in the world to be killed in a car accident, in the grounds of The Crystal Palace.
• * Start of development of Trafford Park, Manchester, pioneering example of a planned industrial estate in England.

• 27 August
• * The shortest war in recorded history, the Anglo-Zanzibar War, starts at 9 in the morning and lasts for 45 minutes of shelling.
• * Britain establishes a Protectorate over Ashanti concluding the Fourth Anglo-Ashanti War.
• 15 September – Pope Leo XIII issues the papal bull Apostolicae curae, declaring all Anglican ordinations to be "absolutely null and utterly void".
• 22 September – Queen Victoria surpasses her grandfather King George III as the longest reigning monarch in British history up to this date.
• 23 September – Kitchener captures Dongola in the Sudan.
• 30 September – August 1897: Lock-out of Welsh slate workers at Penrhyn Quarry.
• 14 November – the Locomotives on the Highway Act raises the speed limit for road vehicles from 4 to 14 mph and, to celebrate this, an 'Emancipation Run' of cars from London to Brighton is held.
• 4–5 December – a storm hits Brighton, destroying the old Chain Pier and badly damaging the other piers and the new Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway.
• 11 December – William Preece introduces Guglielmo Marconi's work in wireless telegraphy to the general public at a lecture, "Telegraphy without Wires", at the Toynbee Hall in London.
• 14 December – Glasgow Subway, the third oldest metro system in the world, begins operations in Glasgow.
• 17 December – Hereford earthquake.

  Undated

• First car factory in Britain to begin series production, Thomas Humber's in Coventry.
• Completion of the first flats in the London County Council's Boundary Estate in the East End of London, the country's earliest public housing scheme, replacing part of the notorious Old Nichol slum.
• Blackpool Pleasure Beach amusement park opens.
• The Arts and Crafts movement house Munstead Wood in Surrey is designed by architect Edwin Lutyens for garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, his first major commission and the start of an influential partnership.

  Publications

• Hilaire Belloc's verse collection The Bad Child's Book of Beasts.
• Joseph Conrad's novel An Outcast of the Islands.
• Marie Corelli's novels The Mighty Atom, The Murder of Delicia and .
• A. E. Housman's poetry collection A Shropshire Lad.
• W. W. Jacobs' short story collection Many Cargoes.
• William Morris's fantasy novel The Well at the World's End.
• Arthur Morrison's social realist novella A Child of the Jago.
• Robert Louis Stevenson's unfinished historical novel Weir of Hermiston.
• H. G. Wells' science fiction novel The Island of Doctor Moreau.

  Births

• 7 January – Arnold Ridley, actor and playwright
• 14 February – Edward Arthur Milne, astrophysicist and mathematician
• 3 May – Dodie Smith, novelist and playwright
• 29 May – Doreen Knatchbull, Baroness Brabourne, aristocrat and socialite
• 6 June – Henry Allingham, became the oldest surviving British veteran of the First World War and briefly the world's oldest man
• 19 June – Wallis Warfield, later Duchess of Windsor, American wife of the Duke of Windsor
• 19 July – A. J. Cronin, Scottish novelist
• 14 August – Albert Ball, flying ace
• 14 October – Bud Flanagan, comedian and singer
• 16 November – Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists
• 17 November – Sophie Catherine Theresa Mary Peirce-Evans, later Mary, Lady Heath, aviator and athlete

  Deaths

• 14 February – George Selwyn Marryat, fly fisherman
• 10 June – Amelia Dyer, baby farm murderer
• 13 August – John Everett Millais, painter
• 3 October – William Morris, artist, writer and socialist
• 11 October – Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury
• 21 October – James Henry Greathead, engineer and inventor