Bank holiday bunting appears automatically on the GOV.UK website thanks to a little program! If you’re reading this post today (Monday 21 April 2025) it’s Easter Monday which is a Bank Holiday in England & Wales and in Northern Ireland you have a chance to see it.
The UK Government’s website has a UK Bank Holidays page which lists all the upcoming dates for the next two years’ worth of bank holidays (so people can put them in the diaries) for England & Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland (the different UK nations share many but not all bank holidays).
Screenshot taken today (Monday 21st April 2025) – the bunting won’t be there tomorrow.
But… if you visit the page on a Bank Holiday then you may be met with some bunting, which doesn’t appear if you visit the page on a non-bank holiday day. People who look after the website added in this little Easter egg* over a decade ago and people have been discovering it ever since. They use an Application Program Interface (API) which connects the bank holiday website to a database which lets the website check, whenever there’s a bank holiday, whether it should display bunting. For example Easter Monday is a celebratory day in the Christian calendar but Good Friday isn’t. Both are holidays but it wouldn’t be appropriate for bunting on Good Friday so it gets the instruction “bunting: false” whereas Easter Monday is “bunting: true”. You can see the API’s instructions here.
If you’re reading this post after Easter Monday 2025 you’ll still have a few more chances to catch the bunting on 5 May (Early May bank holiday) and 26 May (Spring bank holiday) then you’ll need to wait until August for the Summer bank holiday then a few more weeks before Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day and New Year’s Day – on those days the bunting changes to tinsel!
*it’s not called an Easter egg because it’s there at Easter, the bunting is there at other times too but because it’s something to discover (like Easter Egg Hunts – find ours at The CS4FN Easter Egg Hunt).
10 Downing Street has a bunting competition to celebrate VE Day
VE Day commemorates ‘Victory in Europe’ which was declared on 8th May 1945, at the end of the second world war. The celebration in 2025 is the 80th anniversary of the event . Children around the UK have been invited to draw some celebratory bunting to decorate 10 Downing Street (the home of the UK Prime Minister) and the competition closes on Wednesday 23rd April 2025.
Find out more, download the triangular bunting template and enter the competition.
“We want to see bunting designs that are colourful, patriotic, and full of creativity and heart.
Designs should look back on years of tradition, commemorate the fallen, and recognise the sacrifices made by communities across the UK during the war.
We also encourage a message of thanks and hope for the future.“
There are several street parties and other events taking place across the UK to celebrate VE day including, on Monday 5th May in London, a televised event that includes a flypast of old and new military aircraft.
– Jo Brodie, Queen Mary University of London
This is an updated version of a snippet that appeared previously on this blog.
Part of a series of ‘whimsical fun in computing’ to celebrate April Fool’s (all month long!).
Subscribe to be notified whenever we publish a new post to the CS4FN blog.
This page is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.
cs4fn 