Between 1920 and 1992, the standard design of British passports was a navy blue hardcover booklet featuring the royal coat of arms emblazoned in gold.

[13] King Henry V of England is credited with having invented what some consider the first passport in the modern sense, as a means of helping his subjects prove who they were in foreign lands.

[29] However, the outbreak of World War I led to the introduction of modern border controls, including in the UK with passage of the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914.

British diplomats joined with 42 countries to draft passport guidelines and a general booklet design resulted from the conference.

For both bearer and wife: profession, place and date of birth, country of residence, height, eye and hair colour, special peculiarities, signature and photograph.

Descriptive text was printed in both English and French (a practice which still[update] continues), e.g., "Accompanied by his wife (Maiden name)/Accompagné de sa femme (Née)".

Member states agreed that passports should be burgundy in colour and feature the heading "European Community" in addition to the country name.

[39][40] Thus, the British government was, after nearly 70 years, forced to retire the traditional navy blue League of Nations format passport.

Two lines of machine-readable text were printed in ICAO format, and a section was included in which relevant terms ("surname", "date of issue", etc.)

[citation needed] These documents were all issued with machine-readable zones and had a hologram over the photograph, which was the first time that British passports had been protected by an optically variable safeguard.

In the late 1990s, ICAO's Technical Advisory Group began developing a new standard for storing biometric data (e.g. photo, fingerprints, iris scan) on a chip embedded in a passport.

The September 11 attacks involving the hijacking of commercial airliners led to the rapid incorporation of the group's technical report into ICAO Doc 9303.

The top-right corners of its front and back covers were cut off, as well as the top-right corner of the final pair of pages, which had been bound in plastic with the bearer's details and a digital chip; a white bar-coded form stating "Renewal" and the bearer's personal details was stuck onto the back cover.

New security features included rich three-dimensional UV imagery, cross-page printing and a single-sheet bio-data page joined with the back cover.

The burgundy passports attracted criticism for their perceived flimsiness, mass-produced nature and sudden deviation from the traditional design.

On 2 April 2017, Michael Fabricant MP said that De La Rue had stated that the coat of arms would "contrast better on navy blue than it currently does on the maroon passports"[52] as part of their pre-tender discussions with the government.

[6] Following open tender under EU public procurement rules in 2018, the Franco-Dutch security firm Gemalto was selected over British banknote and travel document printer De La Rue.

The result of the tender proved highly controversial, as it saw the production of British passport blanks moved from Gateshead in the UK to Tczew, Poland.

The passport has the national flowers of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales (Tudor Rose, Shamrock, Scotch Thistle and Daffodil, respectively) embossed on the back cover.

Prior to National Registration Day, 65,000 enumerators across the country delivered forms which householders were required to record their details on.

On the following Sunday and Monday the enumerators visited every household, checked the form before issuing a completed identity card for each of the residents.

However, in the Conservative – Liberal Democrat Coalition Agreement that followed the 2010 General Election, the new government announced that they planned to scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity Register, and the next generation of biometric passports, as part of their measures "to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour Government and roll back state intrusion".

The identity card was expected to cost up to £60 (with £30 going to the Government, and the remainder charged as processing fees by the companies that would be collecting the fingerprints and photographs).

[67] British passports with EU status facilitated access to consular assistance from another European Union member state.

[81] British nationals who were EU citizens (except those connected only to the Crown Dependencies) had the right to live and work freely in the European Economic Area and Switzerland until the Brexit transition period ended on 31 December 2020.

Since then, they continue to enjoy visa-free travel to the Schengen Area for short stays, as well as the right to live and work in the Republic of Ireland, as British citizens are not treated as aliens under Irish law.

Other classes of British nationals were not considered to be EU citizens, but also had and continue to enjoy visa-free travel to the Schengen Area for short stays.

The rear cover of blue passports are also embossed with the floral emblems of England (Tudor rose), Northern Ireland (Shamrock), Scotland (Scottish thistle) and Wales (daffodil).

[59] Burgundy passports issued by the UK, Gibraltar and the Crown Dependencies follow a different format, as they are based on the EU common model.

Certain British passports are issued with printed endorsements on the Official Observations page, usually in upper case (capital letters).