The British Chess Championships are organised by the English Chess Federation. The main tournament incorporates the British Championship, the English Chess Championships and the British Women's Chess Championship so it is possible, although it has never happened, for one player to win all three titles in the same competition. The English Women's Chess Championship was also incorporated into this event but did not take place in 2015 and was held as a separate competition in 2016. Since 1923 there have been sections for juniors, and since 1982 there has been an over-sixty championship. The championship venue usually changes every year and has been held in different locations in England, Scotland, Wales and once on the Isle of Man.

Sultan Khan was a British Indian Punjabi chess player, and later a citizen of Pakistan, who is thought to have been the strongest chess master of his time from Asia. The son of a Muslim landlord and preacher, Khan travelled with Colonel Nawab Sir Umar Hayat Khan, to Britain, where he took the chess world by storm. In an international chess career of less than five years (1929–33), he won the British Championship three times in four attempts, and had tournament and match results that placed him among the top ten players in the world. Sir Umar then brought him back to his homeland, where he gave up chess and returned to cultivate his ancestral farmlands in the area which became Pakistan. He lived there before dying in his sixties in the city of Sargodha. David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld have called him "perhaps the greatest natural player of modern times". In 2024 FIDE posthumously awarded him the title of Honorary Grandmaster.