iCalendar for English Bank Holidays

Rowan — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:04:45 +0000

I've been making increasing use of Lightning (backed onto Google Calendar) recently, for both work and personal use, and being able to see bank holidays in my calendar would be very handy. But for some reason, all I can ever find is calendars for "UK Holidays", which are pretty useless - for one thing, not all parts of the UK have the same bank holidays, and for another, they tend to include random events like Saints' Days which aren't "holidays" in the sense of a day off work!

So I decided to make my own calendar, showing bank holidays, in England, and nothing else. And, just for the sake of it (and because there was a very nice-looking library available), I wrote my first ever Ruby script to generate the iCal file for it! A seasoned Ruby coder will probably look at it and laugh, but hey, it works!

The dates are based on this government website, which currently has data up to 2011. The resulting files should work fine in Lightning, and as imports to Google Calendar, so feel free to "subscribe".

Bank Holidays in England and Wales
Bank Holidays in Northern Ireland
Statutory Bank Holidays in Scotland (note that Scottish holiday arrangements appear to be more complicated)

rwec.co.uk » ical

iCalendar for English Bank Holidays