Britain's Earthquakes Since 1382: Clusters, Coalfields and How Often the Big Ones Come

Britain lies far from any plate boundary, yet its earthquake record is long and rich. I combine the British Geological Survey's historical catalogue (all known UK earthquakes before 1970, 471 events from 1382) with its instrumental catalogue (1970 to 2 September 2024, 6,561 events after removing 1,273 duplicate rows) and place every epicentre relative to the British coast, Ordnance Survey towns and mapped coal mines. 5,513 earthquakes lie on land in Great Britain or within 20 km of its coast. For magnitude 2.0 and above since 1980, the Gutenberg-Richter b-value is 0.92 (95% interval 0.86 to 0.99), implying a magnitude 4 or larger about every 3.9 years and a magnitude 5 or larger about every 32 years; the long record since 1750 holds 91 and 15 such events, one every 3.0 and 18 years. The record is strongly shaped by detection: the share of instrumental events below magnitude 2 rose from 69% in the 1970s to 87% in the 1990s while counts of magnitude 3 and above did not rise. The four busiest 20 km squares since 1970 are all coalfields. Of onshore earthquakes recorded from 1970 to 2014, 40% lay within 5 km of a coal mine mapped in OpenStreetMap, against 10% of British land; they were shallower and less frequent at weekends, and the share fell to 15% after the last deep mines closed in 2015. 41% of British towns and cities have had a magnitude 4 or larger within 25 km. Earthquake data derived from the British Geological Survey UK historical and modern earthquake catalogues. Contains British Geological Survey materials © UKRI 2026. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/british-earthquakes/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/british-earthquakes. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/28/british-earthquakes/.