Rule Brittanica! <:-D

If we're going for innovations, could an innovative individual like Arthur C. Clarke count? He was the prophet of the Space Age, after all. Or how about Peter Higgs? Tim Berners-Lee? Dorothy Hodgkin? Stephen Hawking? John Sulston? James Lovelock?

1953: Watson and Crick announce discovery of the double helix structure of DNA

Call it a personal peeve, but I still think Rosalind Franklin got a raw deal out of this. She was the one that obtained the evidence in the first place (the photographs), and yet Maurice Wilkins got more credit than her. Darned adversarial scientists.

1965: The theory of plate tectonics and continental drift

That's not exactly a clear-cut "British Science innovation". Never mind that Wegener was the originator of the theory, most of the work was done by Americans like Maurice Ewing, Bruce Heezen, and especially Harry Hess. The main English person who contributed, as far as I can tell, was Arthur Holmes, and he mostly was the inspiration for Hess's ideas of the convection currents involved.

Comment 9 by Cartomancer

Science still has limited PR as far as the mainstream is concerned; most people know it as a technology hatchery or as "something the geeks do". I doubt many of them have ever considered that science is a way of thinking.