Prince Charles marries Diana Spencer in St Paul's Cathedral in London

English author Anita Brookner publishes her first novel, A Start in Life

British snooker player Steve Davis wins the first of six world championship titles

Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats, based on the Old Possum poems by T.S. Eliot, opens in London

Michael Frayn's farce Noises Off opens in London's West end

British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, promoter of the punk style, shows a collection called Punkature

British economist Nicholas Kaldor attacks monetarism in The Economic Consequences of Mrs Thatcher

Ronald Harwood's play The Dresser is partly inspired by the British actor Donald Wolfit

British skaters Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean earn a perfect score for their Bolero programme in the Sarajevo winter Olympics

British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and union leader Arthur Scargill begin a bitter personal struggle in the miners' strike

English athlete Daley Thompson sets an Olympic and world record in the decathlon at the Los Angeles Olympics

English author Julian Barnes publishes a multi-faceted literary novel, Flaubert's Parrot

British architects James Stirling and Michael Wilford complete a new art gallery for Stuttgart

Genetic (or DNA) fingerprinting is invented and developed by British geneticist Alec Jeffreys

Ian Botham is the first player to achieve the double triple, with a total of more than 3000 runs and 300 wickets in Test cricket

The miners' strike, ending after eleven bitter months, proves a turning point in the struggle between Margaret Thatcher and the unions

17-year-old German tennis-player Boris Becker becomes the youngest ever to win the men's singles at Wimbledon

Live Aid, an all-day concert for famine relief in Africa, is held simultaneously in London and Philadelphia

Britain's Margaret Thatcher and Ireland's Garret FitzGerald sign an Anglo-Irish Agreement to tackle shared problems

British Rasta poet Benjamin Zephaniah publishes his second collection as The Dread Affair

Tony Cragg's Raleigh is unveiled outside the Tate Gallery in his home town of Liverpool

Harrison Birtwistle's second opera, The Mask of Orpheus, brings him an international reputation

Mad Cow Disease (BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy ) is identified and described in Britain

English poets John Fuller and James Fenton collaborate in a volume of satirical poems, Partingtime Hall

Talking Heads, a series of dramatic monologues by English author Alan Bennett, is broadcast on British TV