List of best-selling singles of the 1950s in the United Kingdom
| 1950s in music in the UK | |
| Number-one singles | |
| Number-one albums | |
| Best-selling singles | |
| Best-selling albums | |
| Summaries and charts 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959 |
|
| ←1949 | 1960→ |
| Top 10/12 singles | |
|
1952, 1953, 1954 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959 |
|
| 1960→ | |
Singles are a type of music release that typically have fewer tracks than an extended play or album; during the 1950s, sales of singles in the United Kingdom were compiled by the magazine New Musical Express (NME), and published weekly as a record chart. The singles chart was founded in 1952 by Percy Dickins of NME, who wanted to imitate the hit parade that featured in the American magazine Billboard; before this, the popularity of a song had been measured by its sales of sheet music. Dickins sampled twenty shops, asking which their ten biggest-selling singles were. His aggregated list of sales was then published in NME on 14 November 1952 as a Top 12 chart.NME's chart is considered by the Official Charts Company (OCC) to be the canonical UK Singles Chart during the 1950s; it was expanded to a Top 20 on 1 October 1954.
Sales of records significantly increased in the mid-fifties, following the birth of rock and roll. As a result, the top ten biggest-selling singles of the 1950s were all released in the latter half of the decade. The biggest-selling single of this period was "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley & His Comets, which became the first single ever to sell more than a million copies in the UK.
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