A 12-year-old Dorset child, Mary Anning, discovers at Lyme Regis a 21 ft (6.4m) fossil of an icthyosaur

Percy Bysshe Shelley is expelled from Oxford university for circulating a pamphlet with the title The Necessity of Atheism

English author Jane Austen publishes her first work in print, Sense and Sensibility, at her own expense

Masked Luddites smash machinery in night raids on factories in Nottingham

Mortlake’s two small breweries merge as a single business

Dora Jordan is forced to leave Bushy House after being abandoned by her royal lover, the Duke of Clarence

Augustus Welby Pugin is born in London, the son of the architectural illustrator Augustus Charles Pugin

Today's Drury Lane Theatre opens

Turner completes the building of his villa. Initially called Solus Lodge, the name is changed to Sandycombe Lodge a year later.

Lord Castlereagh becomes British foreign secretary in Spencer Perceval's government

Britain's first primary school is established by Robert Owen at New Lanark in Scotland

The British prime minister, Spencer Perceval, is assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons by John Bellingham

After the death of Perceval, Lord Liverpool begins a 15-year spell as Britain's prime minister

Damage to US trade by British orders in council prompts war (the War of 1812) between the two nations

The US frigate Constitution, affectionately known as 'Old Ironsides', wins successes against British warships in the Atlantic

The first two cantos are published of Byron's largely autobiographical poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, bringing him immediate fame

A copper beech is planted in the garden of Asgill House, which survives into the twenty-first century in good health and at a magnificent size

William Hedley's Puffing Billy, the first steam locomotive running on smooth rails, goes to work at Wylam colliery

Quaker philanthopist Elizabeth Fry, appalled by the condition of female prisoners in London's Newgate gaol, begins campaigning on their behalf

Pride and Prejudice, based on a youthful work of 1797 called First Impressions, is the second of Jane Austen's novels to be published

A cold February freezes the Thames and makes possible the last of London's famous frost fairs

English engineer George Stephenson builds his first locomotive, the Blucher, and runs it at the Killingworth colliery

Robert Peel, chief secretary for Ireland, introduces a police force soon known as the 'Peelers'

The Times, England's oldest daily newspaper, becomes the first to print on a steam press

The Custom House burns, just upstream of the Tower of London