The Polish Government in Exile, though denied majority international recognition after 1945, remained at its post in London until formally dissolved in 1991, after a democratically elected president had taken office in Warsaw.

Since the European Union's 2004 enlargement, a significant number of Poles emigrated to the United Kingdom and now constitute one of the largest ethnic minorities in the country.

The United Kingdom gave full support to Poland's applications for membership in the European Union and NATO.

When Queen Mary I of England and King Philip II of Spain were married in 1554, Krzysztof Warszewicki was present to attend and witness their wedding.

Unlike her Catholic sister, Queen Elizabeth I was a Protestant and gave her support to the Dutch cause against their Spanish Habsburg overlords in the Eighty Years' War.

However, as Norman Davies writes, Działyński was overly direct and blunt by threatening the Dutch and the English with an embargo of their merchants and goods.

English diplomats and merchants enjoyed transit through Poland to the Middle East to bypass Spanish spies and trade rivals in the Mediterranean.

The multilateral agreement, which the Journal of the House of Commons calls "Treaty of Friendship and Alliance", came during the War of the Austrian Succession in which Britain fought on the side of Maria Theresa of Austria, the Queen of Hungary.

During the Congress of Vienna, Lord Castlereagh, British Foreign Secretary from 1812 to 1822, was a major proponent of restoration of Polish independence, but he later dropped that point to attain ground in areas on which the United Kingdom had greater interest.

Britain, along with its allies France and the United States, was crucial in securing Polish independence at the end of World War I in order to recruit national minorities against the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

During the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I, the British delegation under David Lloyd George opposed France and the United States's territorial concessions towards Poland as excessive and potentially provocative towards the Weimar Republic.

Lloyd George was influential in making Danzig (Gdańsk) an autonomous city-state rather than a direct Polish territory, and also secured the Upper Silesia plebiscite.

Lloyd-George adopted a policy in which it would support Poland's defense against the Soviet Red Army west of the Curzon Line but would oppose attempts to reconquer its pre-Partition borders as its leader Józef Piłsudski desired.

At first glance, that treaty was just a catch-all mutual assistance pact against the aggression of any other European nation, but a secret protocol attached to the agreement made clear that it was to defend Poland from Germany.

At first, British relations to Soviet-occupied Polish People's Republic were largely neutral with some sections of the far left even being supportive of the regime.

The results of the 2011 British census has shown that Polish is now the second most common spoken first language in Northern Ireland, after English, and surpassed Ulster Scots and Irish.

Poland and the United Kingdom have staged several intergovernmental consultations,[17][18] the last of which took place in December 2018 in London with Prime Ministers Theresa May and Mateusz Morawiecki and their cabinet members.

[20] In December 2020, Poland sent medical and military personnel to help administer more than 15,000 COVID-19 tests to people who were stuck in a huge roadblock outside the English Channel in Kent, thus allowing them to enter France and relieving the traffic jam.

[22] In response to the Russian military build-up proceeding the invasion, on 17 February 2022, the UK, Poland and Ukraine agreed a British–Polish–Ukrainian trilateral pact to strengthen strategic cooperation between the three countries.

[23] In a poll published by Rating Group, Ukrainian respondents voted in favour of closer ties to Poland and the UK as opposed to NATO membership.