The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English, both spoken and written, from the late twentieth century.
More information can be found on the BNC website.
This original version of the BNC was released in 1994, and is an important historical snapshot of the language at that time. A comparative corpus from a more recent period is also available in the form of the British National Corpus 2014.
