Peter Keeling

Striking workers playing cards, May 1926. Hulton/Getty Images.

How the General Strike Changed Britain

The General Strike of May 1926 was quickly defeated, but it would rupture and recast the landscape of British politics. For some, the strikers’ failure was an opportunity.

Declaration of the result of the 1880 general election poll at Leeds Town Hall, in which Gladstone’s Liberals have a majority, illustration for The Graphic, 10 April 1880. Look and Learn / Illustrated Papers Collection / Bridgeman Images.

The End of Britain’s Weeks-Long General Elections

General elections in Britain were once weeks-long affairs of corruption and chaos. The shift to one-day polling was slow.

Covent Garden Market during the Westminster election, by Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Charles Pugin, c.1810.

Voting Before the Secret Ballot

Before the secret ballot, voting in Britain was a theatrical, violent and public affair. The Act that made democracy private turned 150 in 2022.

Polling in a Pandemic

The general election of 1918 was a ‘cynical muddle’ held as influenza killed thousands across a country emerging from the First World War.

Child Voters

In the politically chaotic decades before true universal suffrage, some infants found a way to vote in British elections.