[nicki143]

I was woken up at 1am GMT we had earthquake it was really weird never experienced one of these before it measured 5.2 on the rictor scale and I live about 60miles from the epicenter. The bedroom was just shaking and the pictures feel off the wall it was really scary.
But I always thought well this is from school when I was there it was like a century ago that England would not have earthquakes and it was all due to plates or something under the earth. And they knew where earthquakes would strike

[firmbeliever]

How are earthquakes predicted?

Knowing where an earthquake might hit is very different from knowing when.

Indonesia has had earthquakes very frequently in the recent years,but they haven't been able to predict the when.

Systems for predicting earthquakes and methods of employing such systems - US Patent 6870482
Latest Earthquakes in the World - Past 7 days

[nicki143]

I know they are hard to predict but from what I remember we were told at school that we would not have them here

[firmbeliever]

Ukequakes

[templelane]

The UK actually experiences a lot of earthquakes about 200-300 a year. However most are so small they are not felt. The one that happened the other day was an unusually large one; they only occur every couple of decades.

So what causes them? You are right that the UK doesn't sit on any subduction zones or plate edges (tectonic hotspots) that cause the earthquakes we get taught about at school. However the tectonic plate we sit on is still moving, feeling pressure from the edges of the plates and rising and falling in response to magma currents under the earth's crust. There are also faults in any tectonic plate. These are areas where the rock is most likely to experience stress, pushing and grinding of rock against each other causing quakes.

Our earth is not as static as we like to think!

No one ever really knows when an earthquake will strike; it is a very imprecise science. There have been a couple that have been successfully predicted but this is the exception to the rule. Places that experience a lot of devastating earthquakes like china put a lot of money into researching quake prediction.