1877 in the United Kingdom

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria
• Prime Minister – Benjamin Disraeli
• Parliament – 21st

  Events

• 1 January – Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India by the Royal Titles Act 1876.
• March – The Nineteenth Century magazine is founded in London.
• 12 March – Britain annexes Walvis Bay in South Africa.
• 14 March – former Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas dies in exile in Southampton.
• 15 March – the first Test cricket match takes place between England and Australia.
• 22 March – the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings is established by William Morris and others meeting in Bloomsbury.
• 24 March – for the only time in history, the Boat Race between the Cambridge University and Oxford University Boat Clubs is declared a "dead heat".
• 10 April – the first human cannonball act in the British Isles is performed by 14-year-old Rossa Matilda Richter at the London Royal Aquarium.
• 12 April – Britain annexes the South African Republic, violating the Sand River Convention of 1852 causing a new Xhosa War.
• 24 April – six Scotch whisky distilleries combine to form Distillers Company.
• 30 April – the Diocese of St Albans is founded within the Church of England from part of the Diocese of Rochester. St Albans Abbey, which is undergoing extensive restoration at this time, is elevated to become St Albans Cathedral and on 12 June Thomas Legh Claughton is enthroned first Bishop of St Albans, an office he holds until 1890.
• 9-19 July – All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club stages its first lawn tennis tournament at Wimbledon. Spencer Gore becomes first gentlemen's singles champion.
• 10 July – St. John Ambulance Association established in England.
• 12 July – Prison Act 1877 transfers responsibility for provision of prisons from counties to the Home Office.
• 21 July – the Cabinet decides to declare war on Russia if it occupies Constantinople in the Russo-Turkish War.
• 10 August – the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge Act removes most restrictions limiting fellowships in colleges of the ancient universities to clergy of the Church of England and permits fellows to marry.
• 23 August – the Merchandise Marks Act obliges exporters to indicate the place of manufacture of their goods.
• 13 September – new Manchester Town Hall, designed by Alfred Waterhouse, officially opened.
• 3 October – W. S. Gilbert's farce Engaged, starring Marion Terry, opens at London's Haymarket Theatre.
• 22 October – Blantyre mining disaster kills 207, Scotland’s worst-ever mining accident.
• 24 November – Anna Sewell's novel Black Beauty published.
• 4 December – American suffragette Victoria Woodhull delivers her first public lecture in London after she and her sister Tennessee Claflin settle in England following their involvement in sensational legal cases in the United States.

  Undated

• Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, as the Freethought Publishing Company, publish for the first time in the UK Charles Knowlton's birth control manual Fruits of Philosophy, for which they are prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act 1857.
• Publication date of Edward Lear's Laughable Lyrics.
• Jesse Boot takes over the family shop in Nottingham, the foundation of Boots the chemists.

  Births

• 7 February – G. H. Hardy, mathematician
• 17 March – Edith New, suffragette
• 22 March – Sefton Brancker, Air Vice Marshal
• 16 May – Bernard Spilsbury, forensic pathologist
• 7 June – Charles Glover Barkla, physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
• 19 July – Arthur Fielder, cricketer
• 1 August – Charlotte Hughes, longest-lived person ever documented in the United Kingdom
• 27 August – Charles Rolls, motorist and aeronaut, co-founder of Rolls-Royce
• 1 September – Francis William Aston, chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
• 2 September – Frederick Soddy, chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
• 4 October – Razor Smith, cricketer
• 10 October – William Morris, founder of Morris Motors and philanthropist
• 27 October – George Thompson, cricketer
• 29 October – Wilfred Rhodes, cricketer
• 15 November – William Hope Hodgson, author
• 25 November – Harley Granville-Barker, actor, playwright and critic

  Deaths

• 2 January – Alexander Bain, inventor
• 24 March – Walter Bagehot, businessman, essayist and journalist
• 25 March – Caroline Chisholm, humanitarian
• 26 May – James Kay-Shuttleworth, educationist
• 14 June – Mary Carpenter, educational and social reformer
• 15 June – Caroline Norton, campaigner for married women's rights
• 14 July – Richard Davies, Welsh poet
• 27 July – John Frost, Welsh-born Chartist leader
• 8 August – William Lovett, Chartist leader
• 17 September – William Fox Talbot, photographer
• 7 November – Calvert Jones, painter and pioneer photographer