6 January – Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter Thorneycroft together with junior Treasury Ministers Enoch Powell and Nigel Birch resign over Cabinet opposition to spending cuts, an event dismissed to the Press the following day by the Prime Minister as "little local difficulties".[1]
20 February – The government announces plans to close the 300-year-old naval dockyards at Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey which would result in more than 2,500 workers losing their jobs.[3]
21 February – Duncan Edwards dies of his injuries in a Munich hospital fifteen days after the Munich air crash. Edwards, twenty-one years old and rated by many as the finest player in England, is the eighth Manchester United player to die.
2 March – A British team led by Sir Vivian Fuchs completes the first crossing of the Antarctic using Sno-Cat caterpillar tractors and dogsled teams in 99 days.[7]
24 March – Work on the M1, Britain's first full-length motorway, begins. The first stretch of the motorway, due to open next year, will run from London to the Warwickshire-Northamptonshire border. During the 1960s, the remainder of the motorway will be built to give London an unbroken motorway link with Leeds some 200 miles away.[10]
The Life Peerages Act receives Royal Assent, the Act allows the creation of life peers who can sit in the House of Lords. As life peerages could be bestowed on women, this Act allows them to sit in the House of Lords for the first time.[13]
Cliff Richard's debut single Move It is released, reaching #2 in the chart. It is credited with being one of the first authentic rock and roll songs produced outside the United States.[20][21]
21 October – The first life peers, including the first female peers, enter the House of Lords.[13] The Baronesses Swanborough (Stella Isaacs, Marchioness of Reading) and Wootton (Barbara Wootton) are the first women to take their seats as life peers, and Lord Parker of Waddington, the Lord Chief Justice of England, the first man to do so.
25 October – The Short SC.1 experimental VTOL aircraft makes its first free vertical flight.
10 November – Donald Campbell sets the world water speed record at 248.62mph.[7]
24 November – An exhibition of computers held at Earl's Court, London, the first of its kind in the world.[1]
25 November – The Austin FX4 London taxi goes on sale, it will remain in production until 1997.
30 November – During the live broadcast of the Armchair Theatre play Underground on the ITV network, actor Gareth Jones has a fatal heart attack between scenes.
10 December – English biochemist Frederick Sanger wins his first Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his work on the structure of proteins, especially that of insulin" (his second comes in 1980).[27]
^Britten, Benjamin (2008). Reed, Philip; Cooke, Mervyn; Mitchell, Donald (eds.). Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, Volume IV, 1952–1957. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. pp. 555, 562. ISBN978-1-84383-382-6.
^Slee, Christopher (1994). The Guinness Book of Lasts. Enfield: Guinness Publishing. ISBN0-85112-783-5.
^"The beauty they gave away". Daily Herald. London. 29 August 1958. p. 2.
^Leach, Nicholas (2003). Oakley Class Lifeboats: an Illustrated History of the RNLI's Oakley and Rother Lifeboats. Stroud: Tempus. ISBN978-0-7524-2784-3.