The UK Championship is a professional ranking snooker tournament. It is one of snooker's prestigious Triple Crown events, along with the World Championship and the Masters. It is usually held at the Barbican in York, England. Ronnie O'Sullivan has won the tournament a record eight times, followed by Steve Davis with six titles and Stephen Hendry with five.

The UK Championship was first held in 1977 at Tower Circus in Blackpool, as the United Kingdom Professional Snooker Championship, an event open only to British residents and passport holders. Patsy Fagan won the inaugural tournament by defeating Doug Mountjoy by 12 frames to 9 in the final, and won the first prize of £2000. For the following year the event moved to the Guild Hall in Preston, where it remained until 1997.

The rules were changed in 1984, when the tournament was granted ranking status and all professionals were allowed to enter. Since then, it has carried more ranking points than any tournament other than the World Championship until being overtaken by the International Championship and the China Open, both of which yield a higher number of ranking points based on the amount of money in pounds sterling on offer for winning the event.

The tournament has seen many memorable finals. In 1977 and 1979, it provided Patsy Fagan and John Virgo with, respectively, their first and only major tournament wins. In 1980, the tournament was won by Steve Davis, as well as in 1981, when the final between Davis and Terry Griffiths set the stage for four more final battles between the two, who were to dominate the rest of the season before their unexpected losses in the first round of the 1982 World Championship. The 1981 runner-up Griffiths became the champion in 1982, defeating Alex Higgins, who in turn was the winner of the 1983 event, beating Davis 16–15 after having trailed 0–7 at the end of the first session. Between 1984 and 1987, all four tournaments were won by Davis again. In 1985, Willie Thorne led Davis 13–8 at the start of the evening session, only to miss a simple blue off its spot and lose 16–14. The victory regenerated Davis's confidence after his devastating World Championship loss; Thorne, on the other hand, never won another ranking title.

In 1988, Doug Mountjoy, at the age of 46, became the oldest winner of the tournament, and the second-oldest winner of a ranking event (Ray Reardon had won the 1982 Professional Players Tournament at the age of 50). Mountjoy produced a stunning display to win the final 16–12 against the rising Stephen Hendry, at a time when the veteran player's presence in the line-up was widely viewed as just making up the numbers. Even more astonishingly, Mountjoy won the Mercantile Credit Classic the following month, which at the time made him only the fourth player to win two ranking tournaments in a row.

Stephen Hendry's 1989 win prefigured his decade of dominance similar to the one prefigured by Davis's win in 1980; its significance was emphasised by the fact that the losing finalist was Davis himself. Hendry's 16–15 win the following year, over Davis again, spoke to his unique qualities of nerve. The final in 1994 against Ken Doherty is considered by many players as one of Hendry's best performances, for he won 10–5 and made seven century breaks along the way, six of which were in the span of eight frames played. Doherty has appeared in two more memorable finals, in 2001, when Ronnie O'Sullivan beat him 10–1, delivering a final's best winning margin since it had become the best of 19 frames in 1993, a feat repeated three years later, in 2004, by Stephen Maguire against David Gray; and in 2002, when Doherty almost won the tournament against Mark Williams, but lost 9–10 in a dramatic deciding frame.

In 1993, the format of the final was reduced from the best of 31 frames to the best of 19 frames. This is the format still used for the final to the current day. Ronnie O'Sullivan became the youngest-ever winner of the tournament (and any ranking tournament) that year, being just 17 years old at the time. Between 1994 and 1996, the championship was won by Stephen Hendry three times in a row, while from 1997 to 2002, the winner was one of the 'Class of '92' each year, with O'Sullivan, John Higgins and Mark Williams all claiming the title twice during this period.

The 2005 tournament saw Steve Davis, aged 48, reach his first ranking tournament final for almost two years and make his highest break in tournament play for 23 years. In a match that featured the widest age gap between finalists in professional tournament history, he lost 6–10 to the 18-year-old Ding Junhui, who became the first non-British or Irish and the second youngest player after O'Sullivan to win the UK Championship. The following year, Peter Ebdon won the title by defeating Stephen Hendry 10-6.