British Trivia
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109 free British trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
47 free British trivia questions with answers. Britain is a country made of countries, with a flag that leaves one of them out, a clock everyone calls by the name of its bell, and a currency that ran to 240 pence in a pound until 1971. This quiz is for people who like that sort of thing. It runs 109 questions across British geography (the four nations and their capitals, the highest peaks, the longest river, the Prime Meridian), history (the Normans, Magna Carta, the Acts of Union, Culloden, the Empire, the NHS, Brexit), institutions (Parliament, the Union Jack, the Crown Dependencies) and the culture that outsiders find baffling and Britons find normal: tea, fish and chips, cheese rolling, Bonfire Night and red telephone boxes. It starts with warm-ups and works up to questions that will catch out plenty of Britons. Every answer has been checked against reference sources, shown under each question once you answer, so it works for a pub quiz, a citizenship-test warm-up or a Britain-themed party.
30 of 109 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which bridge over the Thames, opened in 1894, raises its roadway to let tall ships pass?
Tower Bridge
Tower Bridge began to open in December 1952 with a double-decker bus still crossing; the driver, Albert Gunter, accelerated and jumped the gap with 20 passengers aboard.
Q 02What are the capitals of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?
Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast
Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast each house a devolved legislature; the Scottish and Welsh ones opened only in 1999, after voters backed them in referendums two years earlier.
Q 03What does 'Great Britain' strictly refer to?
The island of England, Scotland and Wales
The island of England, Scotland and Wales is Great Britain, which is why the state's full name adds 'and Northern Ireland', and why the Ordnance Survey, Great Britain's mapping agency, makes no maps of Northern Ireland.
Q 04Which monarch reigned when England and Scotland united as one kingdom in 1707?
Queen Anne
Queen Anne backed the union and became the first sovereign of the new kingdom; she outlived all her children, so on her death in 1714 the crown passed to her German cousin George I.
Q 05Which monarch reigned when Great Britain and Ireland merged in 1801?
George III
George III became the first king of the United Kingdom, then refused the Catholic emancipation his prime minister William Pitt wanted to go with the union, and Pitt resigned that same year.
Q 06What happened in England in 1066?
The Norman conquest
The Norman conquest: William of Normandy beat King Harold at Hastings on 14 October 1066, just 19 days after Harold's army had crushed a Norwegian invasion at Stamford Bridge and marched south.
Q 07Where did King John seal Magna Carta in 1215?
Runnymede
Runnymede was neutral ground, a Thames meadow between the king's castle at Windsor and the rebel camp at Staines; the barons had just taken London, which forced John to come to terms.
Q 08Which Stuart king was executed in 1649 after the English Civil War?
Charles I
Charles I was beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall on 30 January 1649; the Commonwealth followed, until his son Charles II was restored in 1660.
Q 09Who is considered the de facto first British prime minister?
Robert Walpole
Robert Walpole led the government for over twenty years from 1721; George II offered him 10 Downing Street as a gift, but he took it only as the official home of the First Lord of the Treasury.
Q 10Roughly what share of the world's land did the British Empire cover at its height?
A quarter
A quarter: the Empire held about 24 per cent of the world's land and nearly as large a share of its people, and it was called 'the empire on which the sun never sets' because it was always daytime somewhere in it.
Q 11What is the highest mountain in the UK and the British Isles?
Ben Nevis
Ben Nevis was confirmed as the highest only in 1847, when Ordnance Survey measurements ended its rivalry with Ben Macdui; in 1881 Clement Wragge climbed it daily to take weather readings.
Q 12Which river beats the Thames as the longest in Great Britain?
The Severn
The Severn runs 220 miles from the Welsh mountains to the sea; very high tides are forced from its wide estuary into the narrowing river, raising the Severn bore, a wave that rolls upstream.
Q 13What is England's highest mountain?
Scafell Pike
Scafell Pike, at 978 metres in the Lake District, is England's highest mountain; its summit was given to the National Trust in 1919 as a First World War memorial.
Q 21Which House of Commons figure is, by tradition, dragged to the chair by fellow MPs on being elected?
The Speaker
The Speaker-elect puts on a show of reluctance and is pulled to the chair, a custom said to date from when the job meant carrying the Commons' unwelcome messages to the monarch.
Q 22As of 2025, which is the largest country by area with King Charles III as head of state?
Canada
Canada is the largest of the 14 realms beyond the UK that share the King; in May 2025 Charles opened its parliament in person, the first monarch to read the throne speech there since 1977.
Q 23Which prime minister announced his resignation the morning after the 2016 EU referendum?
David Cameron
Q 14Which tunnel has the longest undersea section of any tunnel in the world?
The Channel Tunnel
The Channel Tunnel runs 23.5 miles (37.9 km) under the sea; when the British and French crews broke through in December 1990, two workers shook hands as the first people to walk between the two countries.
Q 15Which London site was chosen in 1884 as the defining point of the Prime Meridian?
Greenwich Observatory
Greenwich Observatory won the vote at the 1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington by 22 to 1; France abstained and kept its own Paris meridian for timekeeping until 1911.
Q 16Which status is shared by the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey, self-governing islands outside the UK?
Crown Dependencies
Crown Dependencies belong to the Crown itself, so the islands make their own laws and send no MPs to Westminster, while the UK looks after their defence and foreign relations.
Q 17What is 'Big Ben' strictly the name of?
The Great Bell of the Westminster clock
The Great Bell of the Westminster clock is the real Big Ben, probably nicknamed after Sir Benjamin Hall; the first casting cracked in testing, and its Whitechapel replacement cracked too, which gives the bell its distinctive tone.
Q 18Which palace became the monarch's official London home when Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837?
Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace began as Buckingham House, a town house built for a duke in 1703; yet foreign ambassadors are still formally accredited to the Court of St James's, named after the more senior palace.
Q 19What is the national animal of Scotland?
The unicorn
The unicorn has long stood for Scotland in heraldry: two of them held up the royal arms of its kings, and one now faces the English lion on the royal arms of the United Kingdom.
Q 20Which three saints' crosses are combined in the Union Jack?
George, Andrew and Patrick
George, Andrew and Patrick: the crosses stand for England, Scotland and Ireland; Wales has none because it was legally part of the Kingdom of England when the first union flag was drawn up in 1606.
David Cameron had called the referendum himself and campaigned to remain; when Leave won with 51.9 per cent, he said outside 10 Downing Street that the country needed fresh leadership.
Q 24Which prime minister's government launched the NHS in 1948?
Clement Attlee
Clement Attlee had been deputy prime minister in the wartime coalition; his government launched the NHS on 5 July 1948 and took coal mining and the railways into state ownership.
Q 25Which Labour health minister founded the NHS?
Aneurin Bevan
Aneurin Bevan, a Welsh miner's son, launched the NHS on 5 July 1948; three years later he quit the government in protest when it brought in charges for dentures and glasses.
Q 26Before Decimal Day in 1971, how many old pence were there in a pound?
240
240: a pound was twenty shillings of twelve pence each, so 240 old pence; banks shut from the Wednesday afternoon before Decimal Day so that every account could be converted.
Q 27Which pre-decimal coin was saved by a public outcry and stayed in circulation until 1980?
The sixpence
The sixpence, or 'tanner', was due to go when Britain went decimal in 1971, but public protest won it a reprieve and it circulated as 2½ new pence until 1980.
Q 28Which dish does Robert Burns's poem hail as 'Great chieftain o' the puddin-race'?
Haggis
Haggis is piped in at Burns suppers every 25 January; as the poem is recited, a knife is plunged into it and it is cut open from end to end.
Q 29Which prime minister called fish and chips 'the good companions'?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill called fish and chips 'the good companions'; the dish was never rationed during the Second World War, when the government treated it as a morale booster.
Q 30Which Victorian novelist gave us the earliest known use of 'chips' for fried potato, in a novel of 1859?
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens wrote of 'husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil' in A Tale of Two Cities, but the scene is a Paris slum; his London 'fried-fish warehouse' is in Oliver Twist.