Frightened county residents were woken at about 1am, as their beds shook. Emergency services were inundated with hundreds of calls.

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Trish Barrett, of Fairmead Crescent in Rushden: "I was awake watching TV with my headphones on at the end of my bed and all of a sudden everything started shaking.

"I took my headphones off and looked outside and couldn't see anything.
"My husband woke up and asked what was going on and I thought it must be a tremor.

"When I looked on the news I found out it was."

A spokesman for Northamptonshire Fire and Rescue said: "We have had several reports from people who felt the tremors. The guys at our Corby station thought the roof was going to come off.

"We didn't have any callouts to incidents during or directly following the earthquake, but we did have two dozen calls from concerned members of the public.

"We had a call just after 7am to chimney in a dangerous condition at Scott Street in Kettering."

Inspector Phil Kings of Northamptonshire Police said: "We received 250 calls from around 12.38am until 1.30am.

"As best we can determine, there was no report of injury or damage to any property."

The quake's epicentre was near Market Rasen, in Lincolnshire, but people across England said they felt buildings shaking shortly before 1am.

Many said the tremors had been strong enough to wake them.

Lee Rushworth, 29, from Hartlepool, was woken up when the tremor made his sofa shake against the bedroom wall of his ground floor flat."I thought someone was banging on the wall behind me but there was no-one there," he said.

A man from Barnsley, South Yorkshire, was taken to hospital after a chimney collapsed and fell into his bedroom.

A spokeswoman for South Yorkshire Ambulance Service said: "We had an emergency call to Wombwell, Barnsley. A chimney had come through the bedroom roof."

The quake's epicentre was near Market Rasen, in Lincolnshire, but people across England said they felt buildings shaking shortly before 1am.

East Midlands Ambulance Service, which covers Lincolnshire, said there had been a lot of emergency calls but no reports of injuries.

"Most of them were from elderly people who were quite frightened," a spokeswoman said.

The British Geological Survey (BGS) initially gave the magnitude for the 12.56am earthquake as 5.3 on the Richter scale but has now said it was closer to 5.2.

It said the centre was 8km east of Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, and 22km south west of Grimsby.

Seismologist Dr Brian Baptie of the BGS said: "This is a significant earthquake for the UK and will have been widely felt across England and Wales."

The BGS said it records around 200 earthquakes in the UK each year - an eighth of which are able to be felt by residents.

It said earthquakes of this size occur in the mainland UK around every 30 years but are more common in offshore areas.

Today's quake is the largest since 1984 when an earthquake measuring 5.4 on the Richter scale shook the Lleyn Peninsula of north Wales and was widely felt across England and Wales.

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