Consumer magazines have a long history in the United Kingdom and Ireland beginning in the seventeenth century, and a number of them that date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are still flourishing. This reference volume offers a representative sample of the current British magazine market, providing detailed profiles of fifty magazines, written mainly by scholars from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and supplementary data on many others. The separately profiled magazines range from the venerable The Scots Magazine (1739), Spectator (1828), Punch (1841), and The Illustrated London News (1842) to relative newcomers of the 1980s such as Country Living (1985), Prima (1986), Q (1986), and House Beautiful (1989). Included are major circulation leaders like Radio Times, Smash Hits, and Woman's Own, prestigious and influential journals like The Economist and New Scientist, regional magazines like Cumbria and The Dalesman, general interest magazines, and a wide variety of magazines in targeted subject or readership categories, like cars, homes, nature, and sports.

Each essay consists of a narrative history from the magazine's founding to the present, concluding with information sources and data on periodicity, publishers, locations of the magazines in the United States, editors, title changes, and circulation. Appendixes list the fifty magazines by date of founding and in subject categories; succinct data on 330 additional British consumer magazines appears in a directory. The volume opens with a concise history of British periodicals. Intended specifically for reference use on British journals, this volume will also be useful for research in journalism history and British cultural history.