The British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean escape to the Soviet Union just ahead of their detection and arrest

The Festival of Britain, on the south bank of the Thames in London, celebrates the end of wartime austerity

British author John Wyndham creates a dark fantasy in his novel The Day of the Triffids

A Question of Upbringing begins Antony Powell's 'A Dance to the Music of Time'

Labour loses the general election and Winston Churchill returns to Downing Street as prime minister

George VI dies and is succeeded by his elder daughter as Elizabeth II

X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, working at King's College in London, photographs DNA

The Queen’s Head pub in Mortlake closes

British scholar Michael Ventris deciphers Linear B, the script of Mycenae, proving it to be an early form of Greek

Evelyn Waugh publishes Men at Arms, the first novel in the Sword of Honour trilogy based on his wartime experiences

British choreographer Kenneth MacMillan creates his first ballet, Somnambulism, to music by Stan Kenton

English author L.P. Hartley sets his novel The Go-Between in the summer of 1900

James Bond, agent 007, has a licence to kill in Ian Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale

English composer William Walton writes Orb and Sceptre for the coronation of Elizabeth II

Anglican vicar Chad Varah, using the crypt of a London church, sets up the first branch of what becomes the Samaritans

Improved methods of testing prove conclusively that Piltdown Man was constructed by Charles Dawson from a human skull and the jaw of an ape

Molecular biologists Francis Crick and James Watson announce their discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA

Dylan Thomas's 'play for voices', Under Milk Wood, is broadcast on BBC radio, with Richard Burton as narrator

A painting by Graham Sutherland, commissioned for Winston Churchill's 80th birthday, does not meet with the full approval of the sitter or his wife

Politician and author Winston Churchill completes his six-volume history The Second World War

Oxford medical student Roger Bannister runs the first four-minute mile, at the Iffley Road track

Anglo-Irish novelist Iris Murdoch publishes her first novel, Under the Net

Barn Elms burns down, and its grounds are converted to school playing fields

18-year-old English jockey Lester Piggott wins the first of a record nine Derbys

William Walton's opera Troilus and Cressida has its premiere at Covent Garden