Display the UK public holidays on your iPhone calendar

July 16, 2009 in Uncategorized

Tap here to subscribe to Google’s UK holidays calendar

Tap here to subscribe to Apple’s UK holidays calendar [The Google calendar seems to be having a lot of issues recently, so I’m including the Apple calendar here as well]

If you have a Google account, go to your Google Calendar and choose Settings. Click on Browse Interesting Calendars. Find the UK holidays and click the Subscribe link. The UK holidays should now be displayed in your Google Calendar page. To get them to appear on the iPhone, go to http://m.google.com/sync and turn on syncing of the UK holidays calendar for your iPhone or iPad.

Incidentally, the above links will also work with Outlook: copy the address from one of the links, go to Outlook, choose Add Calendar > From Internet, then paste in the link. Outlook should ask you if you want to download and subscribe to the calendar.

25 comments

Comments feed for this article

March 3, 2010 at 5:58 pm

Mike

Tried your simple instructions above for ical, but they will not verify. Any suggestions?

I have an iphone 3G, and all software is up to date.

March 3, 2010 at 6:07 pm

davidrendall

I just went through it again from scratch myself and it worked OK. However, the user interface is a bit weird: you have to tap Save *twice* for it to really save it, the first time it verifies and the second time it will take you back to the calendars settings page. Not at all obvious, I’d say, so perhaps that’s where you were tripped up…?

May 27, 2010 at 1:12 pm

wazology

Perfect – many thanks for this… Just what I wanted up & running in 30 seconds.

January 7, 2011 at 11:12 pm

Tris

Worked a treat – badtyping of hte address first time round
got me a little worried but retyped properly and all worked.
Brilliant! Thanks a lot.

January 25, 2011 at 9:52 am

Nick Larter

The URL in your article gets cut off in Internet Explorer 8. For those that can’t get the calendar to verify, right-click on the URL and select “Copy shortcut” then paste this into an empty notepad document.

You’ll see that the full URL really is: http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/uk__en_gb@holiday.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

January 25, 2011 at 9:53 am

Nick Larter

(it got trimmed in my comment also…) The URL should end in: holiday.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

January 25, 2011 at 2:24 pm

davidrendall

Thanks Nick. It’s an artifact of the wordpress skin, unfortunately. Let me see what I can do about fixing it. I assumed that everyone would know to right-click and copy the url, but of course assuming is a very bad thing to do!

April 4, 2011 at 11:45 am

Paul

Thank for you very much. Worked fine

April 7, 2011 at 10:01 pm

Jamie

Perfect!! Just what I was looking for.

April 13, 2011 at 6:15 am

Vic

Thank you this is so helpful just what I needed

February 22, 2012 at 9:28 pm

Mike

Brilliant! Thanks very much, esp for copy and paste link.

February 23, 2012 at 9:45 am

davidrendall

You’re welcome, glad to know it worked OK for you.

February 27, 2012 at 12:55 pm

perry

Thanks, that has made my life a bit easier!!!

March 14, 2012 at 12:21 am

Mary

Amazing, thanks!

March 16, 2012 at 7:44 am

Richard

Just brilliant. Thanks!

April 15, 2012 at 5:57 pm

heelspur

Just tried through iPad June holidays aren’t coming up any suggestions what’s going wrong guys plz

April 16, 2012 at 11:30 am

davidrendall

Hi. I think perhaps the calendar was playing up on Google’s side of things. I couldn’t get it to work earlier either, but have just tried again now and it’s fine. Sometimes the iPad can get a bit confused with syncing calendars, so try rebooting it. Also, check that you’ve got the calendar selected to display in your calendar app – tap the Calendars button at top-left and make sure the UK Holidays calendar has a tick beside it.

April 28, 2012 at 4:03 pm

Coffee

When I tried this first, it worked fine !, but now it’s not showing any of the Calendar :-(

April 28, 2012 at 6:30 pm

davidrendall

The google calendar seems to be a bit temperamental of late. Try again later? I’ll try it myself and report back if I find out anything.

April 30, 2012 at 10:54 am

davidrendall

Hello Coffee, There’s definitely something wrong on the Google side of things. I’ve tried several different methods to get subscribe to the calendar and none work. I’ve posted in the Google Calendar forum to see if anyone else is having the same problem. In the meantime, try subscribing to the Apple calendar instead:

webcal://ical.mac.com/ical/UK32Holidays.ics

April 30, 2012 at 12:10 pm

davidrendall

I’ve updated the article to offer a choice of Google or Apple’s calendars. I can’t get the Google one to work at all today, but judging by previous experience it will probably come back to life soon. I’ve also tried to simplify the article so it is easier to use. Note that the links I’ve used are TinyURLs because WordPress won’t let me create webcal:// links. Thank you for bringing the Google problem to my attention, Coffee.

August 27, 2012 at 2:33 am

Ian