Kleber Afonso stands in his damaged bedroom in Barnsley, northern England, after the earthquake. (Reuters)

London, Feb. 27: Lady Pramila Parekh, wife of the renowned Indian academic Lord Bhikhu Parekh, was feeling very tired when she went to bed just after midnight last night at her home in Hull in Yorkshire.

“I think I fell asleep straight away,” she said today. “It must have been about 1am when I felt the bed shake. It shook so violently that I was almost thrown out of bed.” She got up, walked around her bedroom and then climbed back into bed.

“I thought it must have been a bad dream,” she told The Telegraph.

This morning by the time she talked to her 73-year-old husband, who was in London, both knew she — in common with millions across the country — had experienced the biggest earthquake to hit England for a quarter of a century.

Compared with the devastating earthquakes that have brought death and destruction to India, Pakistan, Iran and Japan in recent decades, no one was reported killed in England today.

The earthquake measured 5.2 on the Richter scale and had an epicentre near Market Rasen in Lincolnshire — barely 60 miles from the Parekh residence — but was big enough to be described as “significant” by British geologists. Chimneys crashed down, causing damage worth tens of millions of pounds, British insurers estimated.

The tremors at 1256 am GMT were felt by people in Newcastle, Yorkshire, London, Cumbria, the Midlands, Norfolk and as far away as Dumfries in Scotland and Swansea in South Wales. In many places, shrieking birds suddenly took to the air.

The most serious injury was suffered by David Bates, a 19-year-old student, whose pelvis was fractured when 2feet by 2feet masonry crashed into his attic bedroom at his home in Barnsley Road, Wombwell, South Yorkshire, while he was watching television.

His father Paul Bates, who was at home with his wife, Vanessa, and their 14-year-old daughter, Ruth, recalled a night of terror: “I’d just heard the big rumble that everyone else heard but then I heard David shouting, ‘Dad!’, and I ran upstairs. This massive piece of stone had landed on his hip and he was just shouting that he thought it was broken and I called an ambulance.

“He was on his way to hospital by 1.20am. Of all the things that can happen — an earthquake! I could not believe it but when I think about it, it could have been worse.”

In Market Rasen, Bev Finnegan, one of the residents, admitted: “The noise was really, really terrifying, it was so deep and rumbling. There were people coming out in their dressing gowns wondering what it was.”

Eleanor Ramsey, 31, a mother of two children, added: “I was scared to death. The whole house was shaking. It felt like a bomb had gone off. I woke up screaming and my son was screaming, so we got the children in bed with us. I have never been so scared in my life.”

There are about 200 tremors a year in the UK but most can only be detected by the British Geological Survey using very sensitive instruments. Today’s main 10-second earthquake, which struck at a depth of 15.4km, was the biggest recorded since one with a magnitude of 5.4 struck north Wales in 1984.