Jamaican-born nurse Mary Seacole sets up her own 'British Hotel' in the Crimea to provide food and nursing for soldiers in need

Frances restores and enlarges Strawberry Hill including the addition of the Waldegrave Drawing Room, spending in excess of £100,000.

Roger Fenton travels out from England to the Crimea – the world's first war photographer

Lord Palmerston heads the coalition government in Britain after Lord Aberdeen loses a vote of confidence on his conduct of the Crimean War

By 1855 the Southwark and Vauxhall, the Grand Junction and the West Middlesex Water Companies have all established works at Hampton and these are now collectively known as Hampton Waterworks

David Livingstone, moving down the Zambezi, comes upon the Victoria Falls

English artist William Simpson sends sketches from the Crimea which achieve rapid circulation in Britain as tinted lithographs

The Christian Socialism of F.D. Maurice and others is mocked by its opponents as 'muscular Christianity'

The Christmas issue of the Illustrated London News includes chromolithographs, introducing the era of colour journalism

Tennyson publishes a long narrative poem, Maud, a section of which ('Come into the garden, Maud') becomes famous as a song

English author Anthony Trollope publishes The Warden, the first in his series of six Barsetshire novels

The treaty of Paris ends the Crimean War, limiting Russia's special powers in relation to Turkey

Victoria and Albert complete their fairy-tale castle at Balmoral, adding greatly to the nation's romantic view of Scotland

English chemist William Henry Perkin accidentally creates the first synthetic die, aniline purple (now known as mauve)

The Kneller Hall Training School closes.

In the cramped sitting room that she shares as a study with Lewes, Marian Evans begins writing her first novel, Adam Bede

David Livingstone urges upon a Cambridge audience the high ideal of taking 'commerce and Christianity' into Africa

Russian exile Alexander Herzen, publishes in London a radical newspaper called Kolokol (The Bell)

Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke set off from Bagamoyo in their search for the source of the Nile

The old Cromwell House is demolished and a new one, designed by Robert Philip Pope, is completed by June 1858

In Tom Brown's Schooldays Thomas Hughes depicts the often brutal aspects of an English public school

Acts of exceptional valour in the Crimean War are rewarded with a new medal, the Victoria Cross, made from the metal of captured Russian guns

Kneller Hall is bought by the War Department and reopened as the Military School of Music, later the Royal Military School of music.

Burton and Speke reach Lake Tanganyika at Ujiji, a place later famous for the meeting between Livingstone and Stanley

Brunel dies just before the maiden voyage of his gigantic final project, the luxury liner The Great Eastern