Miners and train and bus company Stagecoach Group were big gainers on the London Stock Exchange in morning trading Wednesday.
Stagecoach's shares were up more than 7 percent after it posted a 12.6 percent increase in full-year profit. The group said pretax profit for the year to April 30 was 196.4 million pounds ($323.5 million), ahead of the consensus forecast of 195 million pounds made by analysts polled by Reuters.
The basic resource sector got a 3.2 percent boost on the DJ Stoxx index as copper and gold prices edged up on a weaker dollar and choppy stocks after the recent selloffs.
British miners like Kazakhmys , Lonmin , Rio Tinto and Anglo American were among the best performers on the FTSE-100, which was trading about flat.
"Essentially the market has been consolidating since early May, with the FTSE going nowhere ... the market rallied in the hope it would get better now we need to see the evidence come through," Andrew Bell, European strategist at Rensburg Sheppards Investment Management, told Reuters.