Shrove Tuesday/Pancake Day 2027

What Shrove Tuesday is

Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day) 2027 is Tuesday 9 February 2027. It is always the day before Ash Wednesday, 47 days before Easter Sunday.

Shrove Tuesday is the last day before Lent, the forty-day season of fasting and reflection that leads up to Easter in the Christian calendar. In the UK almost everyone calls it Pancake Day, and some people call it Pancake Tuesday. The same day is Mardi Gras (“Fat Tuesday”) in France, New Orleans and the carnival cities of the world. The Church of England describes it as “one last chance for a big party before Lent begins with Ash Wednesday the next day” and confirms that Shrove Tuesday always falls 47 days before Easter.

The name comes from the old English word “shrive”, meaning to confess your sins and be absolved by a priest. Pancakes come into it because Lent was once a strict fast: eggs, butter and milk were off the menu until Easter, so the sensible thing to do on the Tuesday was to use them all up in a frying pan. Nobody organises Pancake Day: it is a church date that has become a national habit, so there is no official body and no annual theme.

How the date is set

The whole chain starts with Easter. Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, which the Royal Observatory Greenwich notes puts it somewhere between 22 March and 25 April. Lent runs from Ash Wednesday to Easter Eve. The Church of England explains that Lent lasts for forty days not including Sundays: forty fasting days plus six Sundays make 46 days, so Ash Wednesday is 46 days before Easter Sunday and Shrove Tuesday is 47 days before it.

That rule means Pancake Day can fall anywhere from 3 February to 9 March, and it moves every year. The Church of England’s published table of variable dates gives Ash Wednesday as 14 February 2029 and 6 March 2030, so Shrove Tuesday will be Tuesday 13 February 2029 and Tuesday 5 March 2030. In 2028 Pancake Day lands on the leap day itself, 29 February.

Shrove Tuesday is not a bank holiday anywhere in the UK, and neither is Ash Wednesday. The gov.uk bank holiday list moves straight from New Year to Good Friday. Schools, shops and offices are open as normal.

A short history

In medieval England a “shriving bell” was rung on Shrove Tuesday morning to call people to church to confess before Lent began. English Heritage records that households also had to clear out the foods they could not eat during the fast, so that they would not be tempted to break the rules. Eggs, milk and fat went into pancakes, and the feast day before the fast became a fixture.

The pancake race is said to date from 1445 in Olney, Buckinghamshire, where the story goes that a housewife heard the shriving bell while she was still cooking, and ran to church in her apron with the frying pan in her hand. Towns across England once had their own pancake bells, rung at noon as the signal to start frying. The custom faded as Lenten fasting relaxed, then came back through charity races and school events. Today Pancake Day is as much a secular food day as a religious one.

Pancake races and other UK traditions

The Olney Pancake Race is the one everyone has heard of. It is run only by women aged 18 and over who live or work in the town, in the traditional apron and headscarf, over a 415-yard course, with the pancake tossed at the start and again at the finish. The race lapsed during the Second World War and was revived in 1948 by the vicar, Canon Ronald Collins, after he found old photographs of the runners. Since 1950 Olney has competed against the women of Liberal, Kansas, who run the same distance on the same day and compare times; the Americans call it International Pancake Day. The organisers say the 2027 race, starting at 11.55am on Tuesday 9 February, will be the 80th since the 1948 revival and the 78th against Liberal.

Scarborough does things differently. At noon the Pancake Bell is rung on North Street, pancake races follow on Aberdeen Walk, and then Foreshore Road on the seafront is closed to traffic for Skipping Day, a mass long-rope skipping session first recorded in 1903 and said to have begun with fishermen handing old ropes to the town’s children. Local schools have traditionally closed at lunchtime for it.

Elsewhere, MPs, peers and journalists have raced each other with frying pans in Victoria Tower Gardens beside Parliament for the disability charity Rehab, and hundreds of churches, schools and village halls run their own races, usually a relay with a flip at each end. Your local council’s events page is the place to look in the fortnight before.

Making pancakes

The British pancake is thin, closer to a crepe than the thick American stack, and it is eaten rolled or folded with lemon juice and sugar. Golden syrup, jam and chocolate spread are the usual alternatives, and savoury fillings are common when pancakes are the whole evening meal.

We are a calendar site, not a cookery site, so we will not pretend to improve on the experts. English Heritage has published a Victorian pancake recipe from Mrs Crocombe, cook at Audley End, using just flour, milk, eggs and butter, on the page linked above. The rules of thumb that matter: rest the batter, get the pan properly hot before the first ladle, and accept that the first pancake is always for the cook.

How to take part

At home. Pancakes for tea is the whole tradition. Let children do the flipping (over a cold pan first) and run a toppings vote. If you observe Lent, this is the day to decide what you are giving up or taking up from tomorrow.

At school. Pancake Day is a reliable fixture for RE and PSHE: the shriving bell, the forty days, and why eggs and fat had to be used up make a self-contained lesson. Many schools run a playground race with a sponge “pancake” or a beanbag, or serve pancakes at lunch.

At work. A pancake breakfast or a frying-pan relay in the car park is one of the cheapest team events in the calendar, and a charity flip-off at a pound a go raises money with no planning beyond buying the batter.

At church. Many parishes hold pancake suppers on Shrove Tuesday evening, often with a race for the children, and then mark Ash Wednesday with a service the following day where ashes from last year’s palm crosses are used to mark a cross on the forehead.

Related days

• Ash Wednesday is the day after Shrove Tuesday and the first day of Lent.
• Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday are the end of the same calendar chain, 45, 47 and 48 days later.
• National Pancake Day on 26 September is an American food day with no link to Lent, which is why “pancake day” searches throw up two different dates.
• Valentine’s Day on 14 February sits in the same window and occasionally lands in the same week; in 2029 Pancake Day is the day before it.