British soul, Brit soul, or (in a US context) the British soul invasion, is soul music performed by British artists. Soul has been a major influence on British popular music since the 1960s, and American soul was extremely popular among some youth subcultures, such as mods, skinheads, and the Northern soul movement. In the 1970s, soul gained more mainstream popularity in the UK during the disco era.

However, a clear genre of British soul did not emerge until the 1980s, when a number of black and white artists who made soul their major focus, influenced by contemporary R&B, began to enjoy some commercial success. British soul artists began gaining popularity in the United States in the late 2000s, resulting in another British Invasion, this time a soul invasion (in contrast to the 1960s rock and pop, and 1980s new wave and synthpop invasions).

Widespread British interest in soul music developed after the advent of rock and roll from the mid-1950s and the subsequent interest in American music. In the early 1960s, rhythm and blues, including soul, was particularly popular among some members of the beat music boom, including the Beatles, and among bands of who contributed to the blues rock, British blues boom, including the Spencer Davis Group, Alexis Korner, John Mayall, the Rolling Stones, the Animals, Them and Van Morrison. Most of these were popular with members of the Mod subculture, out of which grew the Northern soul movement, in which northern English youths avidly collected and played rare soul records.

Britain produced a handful of soul acts in the 1960s, most significantly the blue-eyed soul singers Tom Jones and Dusty Springfield. Dusty in Memphis (1969) is one of the few albums by a British performer considered among the great soul recordings. In 1964, Springfield became the first British Invasion act after the Beatles to chart well in the US. A string of US and British hits followed. In 1965, Springfield hosted a television show The Sound of Motown, that has been widely credited with introducing what was called "The Sound of Young America" to British audiences. Arguably the most notable Motown-influenced act from the UK aside from Springfield were the Foundations, a multi-racial soul group described by Billboard as "the best practitioners of the Motown sound to be found on the far side of the Atlantic" in the late 1960s, who scored transatlantic hits with "Baby Now That I've Found You" (the first UK number one for a multi-racial band), "Build Me Up Buttercup" and "In the Bad Bad Old Days (Before You Loved Me)". British pop soul group the Equals gained hit "Baby Come Back".

It has been suggested that the performance of soul in Britain was so limited because white fans saw it as exclusively a black genre, and because black British performers, while incorporating some sounds into other forms such as reggae, considered soul a distant American genre. At the same time, bands led by black singers, notably Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band, and Jimmy James and the Vagabonds, established strong reputations as live acts in Britain, largely playing cover versions of American soul records; Washington was an American expatriate, and James was from Jamaica.

A handful of British artists continued to perform soul-inspired music in the 1970s. These included David Bowie, whose "Plastic soul" on his Young Americans album (1975), helped keep the sound in the British mainstream. Elton John gained blue eyed soul hit "Benny and the Jets". He experimented with the Philadelphia soul/disco sound while working with producer Thom Bell in 1977, sessions which eventually resulted in a UK #1 for John when "Are You Ready for Love" was re-released in 2003.

The Equals (with Eddy Grant), who had come to prominence in the late 1960s playing Caribbean-influenced pop-rock, embraced harder funk sounds on their 1970s releases, most notably on their UK top-10 hit "Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys". Sweet Sensation were the first all-black British soul band to score a UK number one hit with their song "Sad Sweet Dreamer" in 1974.

Also of note were the Average White Band, one of the few white soul groups to attain both critical respect and commercial success, particularly in the United States, where they simultaneously hit the number one spot on the Billboard pop singles and albums charts with "Pick Up the Pieces" and its album AWB, and scoring a Top 10 follow-up with 1975's "Cut the Cake". Although they were ignored in the UK, the Caribbean-British band Cymande enjoyed American success in the first half of the 1970s with their mix of funk, jazz, rock, Afrobeat and Caribbean influences, becoming the first British act to play the Apollo Theater in Harlem. After their split in 1975, their music became popular as a source of breaks among early hip-hop DJs including Grandmaster Flash, DJ Kool Herc and Jazzy Jay, was championed in the UK rare groove scene, and went on to be sampled extensively in rap and dance music, by acts including the Fugees, Wu-Tang Clan and Norman Cook.