Late on December 3, 2025, as most of north-west England was winding down for the night, a sudden and startling tremor jolted thousands of residents awake. According to the British Geological Survey (BGS), a 3.3-magnitude earthquake struck shortly after 11:23 PM, with its epicenter near the coastal village of Silverdale in Lancashire. The quake, which lasted about 20 seconds, was felt across a broad swath of Lancashire and the southern Lake District, including the towns of Kendal, Ulverston, and even as far as Blackpool—up to 30 miles from the epicenter.
For many, it was a night they won’t soon forget. Nikki Maddox, who runs the Blossom Bird coffee shop in Silverdale and lives above the shop with her son, described the moment in vivid detail to the BBC: “I had just climbed into bed and I heard this enormous rumble. It shook the whole house, it was very, very terrifying.” She added, “It lasted long enough for me to think 'oh no, the roof is caving in, this is going to be expensive.'” The noise, she said, was “deafening,” and the shaking so intense she could feel her bed move against the wall.
Liz Unsworth, a Silverdale Parish Councillor, echoed Maddox’s fear, telling the BBC, “It was really scary. I was relaxing before going to bed and I suddenly felt like my roof was falling in, the house was shaking. All my neighbours were outside, we didn’t know what it was [at the time].”
Over in Carnforth, about five miles from the epicenter, Katrina Simmons was startled out of her sleep. “The shaking woke me up, I thought someone had driven into the house,” she told BBC reporters. “It was about 25 to 12 and I jumped straight out of bed. I live on my own so it gave me a hell of a scare.” Simmons learned the true cause only the next morning, after checking social media. “A customer this morning said all the emergency services were on standby at Aldi, at that time they thought it might have been an explosion. Someone said they could hear a helicopter circling.”
The quake’s depth, according to BGS data, was 1.86 miles beneath the surface—shallow enough to cause intense vibrations and noise. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reported a similar event, putting the magnitude at 3.4 and the epicenter about 1.86 miles east of Warton village, though the BGS’s assessment of Silverdale as the epicenter was widely accepted by local authorities and the media.
“The event was felt across the South Lakes and Lancashire, mainly within 20 km (12.4 miles) of the epicentre, including Lancashire, Kendal and Ulverston. Reports describe: ‘felt like an explosion and vibration coming from underground’ and ‘so powerful to shake the whole house,’” the BGS stated in a press release. The Volcano Discovery website, which collects firsthand reports of seismic events, received over 1,100 submissions from people as far away as Blackpool and North Lancaster. Residents described hearing a “loud rumble and rattling of fixtures in house, as though something had collapsed or the chimney had fallen off.” One person in Carnforth wrote, “Heard a rumbling sound which intensified into a loud bang. Thought my roof was collapsing or something! Very scary.”
Some locals initially suspected more familiar causes for the disturbance. Clare Hailes, a shop assistant in North Lancaster, recounted, “I know the general manager got a call in the middle of the night because it set the alarms off. Customers have been talking about it all morning. They thought a lorry had crashed into a building or there had been a quarry explosion. No-one was expecting it to be an earthquake.” On social media, confusion and fear were rampant. Sue Anderson wrote on a Carnforth community page, “Absolutely shaken to my core. Don’t think I’ll be sleeping tonight, terrified.” Lynn Snowdon, also from Carnforth, posted, “What the hell was that? House just shaken like a leaf?”
Emergency services responded quickly to the flood of calls. Lancashire Police, Fire and Rescue Service, and the North West Ambulance Service all deployed officers to the area. In an online statement, Lancashire Police confirmed, “At 11.23pm on Wednesday night, we received reports of a loud explosion in the Carnforth area. There has been a minor earthquake in the area, near to the Lancashire and Cumbria border, measuring 3.3 magnitude. There have been no reports of anyone injured or damage caused but we have officers in the area, together with colleagues from the Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service and the North West Ambulance Service.”
Despite the widespread alarm, there were no reports of injuries or significant property damage. Most of the disturbance was limited to rattling windows, shaking furniture, and triggering shop and house alarms. Some residents noted that their pets panicked and barked incessantly, and pub owners reported glasses shaking behind the bar, though nothing was broken.
Earthquakes of this magnitude are rare in the United Kingdom, a country far from major tectonic fault lines. The BGS notes that while it detects between 200 and 300 earthquakes each year in the UK, only about 20 to 30 are strong enough to be felt by people. “Most of these are very small and cause no damage. However, some British earthquakes have caused considerable damage, although nothing like the devastation caused by large earthquakes in other parts of the world,” the BGS explained. A magnitude 4 earthquake strikes Britain on average every two years, and a magnitude 5 every 10 to 20 years. The largest earthquake ever recorded in the UK was estimated at magnitude 6.5, though such powerful events are exceedingly rare.
The December 3 tremor was the strongest in England since a similar 3.3-magnitude event in Staffordshire in 2023, and the most significant in north-west England since a 3.7-magnitude quake shook Morecambe Bay in 2009, according to The Guardian. It was also the second earthquake to hit the UK in December 2025, following a smaller 1.0-magnitude event in Newport, south Wales, just two days earlier.
For many in Lancashire and Cumbria, the quake was a reminder that even in a region known more for rolling hills than rumbling earth, nature can still deliver a jolt. As Professor Adam Taylor of Lancaster posted on X, “Definitely felt this earthquake in north Lancaster. We live near the West Coast Main Line and initially thought the rumbling was a train but then felt the shaking.”
While the ground has since settled, the memory of that sudden, deafening tremor lingers in the minds of those who experienced it, a rare reminder of the unpredictable forces beneath the British Isles.