UK Ordnance Survey Land-Form Panorama® Land-Form Panorama is a 50 m terrestrial DEM for Britain, offered free of charge from Ordnance Survey as part of its Open Data initiative:
http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/opendata/ Quality should be at least quite as good as SRTM 3 arc sec, due to the slightly better resolution and the advantage of terrestrial over orbital DEMs.
The package can be downloaded from the Open Data “Supply” page. Download size is approximately 530 MB. It contains the data for all of Britain in three different file formats. TransDEM supports the raster variant (DTM) in ASCII grid format (aka ESRI grid). File type is .asc.
Data is packed into tiles of 20 x 20 km and structured by O/S grid squares. To find the grid square, an overview map should be loaded in TransDEM and the coordinate system switched to OSGB36. Grid square codes are shown in the TransDEM status bar, if the View | Show grid square option is activated. The numerical digits in the file name indicate the 20 km tile in square coordinates, the first digit for the easting, the second digit for the northing.
The tile files can be opened in TransDEM as ordinary DEMs. TransDEM will detect that the coordinates are not geographic and ask for the coordinate system. If the coordinate system has not already been switched to OSGB36 in the main menu it must be set so for each tile file individually.