Focus of the Thursday's session was on BoE's Inflation Report and interest rate decision.  The Bank of England said on Thursday interest rates probably need to rise sooner and by a bit more than it thought only three months ago, because Britain's slow-moving economy is getting a boost from the global recovery. The BoE's rate-setters are giving themselves time to assess how Britain is coping with its impending departure from the European Union as they voted 9-0 to hold Bank Rate at 0.5 percent, in line with a Reuters poll of economists. But Governor Mark Carney and colleagues saw a growing need to move faster on raising rates to keep a grip on inflation in the world's sixth-biggest economy, echoing other leading central banks which are moving toward tighter monetary policy, a decade on from the financial crisis.

The BoE said it now wanted to return inflation to its 2 percent target over "a more conventional horizon", which would mean curbing price growth within two years rather than three. "Were the economy to evolve broadly in line with the February Inflation Report projections, monetary policy would need to be tightened somewhat earlier and by a somewhat greater extent over the forecast period than anticipated at the time of the November Report," the Monetary Policy Committee said.

Friday's session brought UK Industrial Production figures. In the three months to December 2017, the Index of Production was estimated to have increased by 0.5% compared with the three months to September 2017, due to a rise of 1.3% in manufacturing; this was partially offset by a decrease of 4.7% in mining and quarrying, caused mainly by the shut-down of the Forties oil pipeline for a large part of December 2017. Within manufacturing, 9 of the 13 manufacturing sub-sectors experienced growth; the largest contribution to quarterly growth came from basic metals and metal products, which increased by 5.7%.

This week markets will be looking at:

CPI/PPI (Tuesday 10:30)

Retail Sales (Friday 10:30)