Northern Rock was the British bank whose collapse became a major early event in the 2007–2008 financial crisis.
Northern Rock, a mortgage lender based in the United Kingdom, sought emergency liquidity assistance from the Bank of England in September 2007. It had relied heavily on wholesale funding and securitization rather than mainly on traditional retail deposits. When global credit markets froze, that funding model became unsustainable.
The bank experienced the first run on a British bank in more than a century. Customers queued to withdraw money, and the government later guaranteed deposits. Northern Rock was eventually taken into public ownership in February 2008.
Its problems appeared before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which occurred in September 2008. Barings Bank is a different British banking failure: it collapsed in 1995 after unauthorized derivatives trading by Nick Leeson. The Northern Rock episode showed how international credit-market stress could quickly reach ordinary depositors.