The National Archives (United Kingdom)

The National Archives is the official national archive of the UK Government, and for England and Wales. The National Archives is open to the public and free to visit, and serve as the guardians of documents dating back to over 1,000 years.
The National Archives is a non-ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom. Its parent department is the Department for Culture, Media and Sport of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. There are separate national archives at the National Records of Scotland and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.
TNA was formerly four separate organisations: the Public Record Office, the Historical Manuscripts Commission, the Office of Public Sector Information and His Majesty's Stationery Office. The Public Record Office still exists as a legal entity, as the enabling legislation has not been modified, and documents held by the institution thus continue to be cited by many scholars as part of the PRO. Since 2008, TNA has also hosted the former UK Statute Law Database, now known as legislation.gov.uk, and since 2022 has hosted a case law database for decisions from superior courts of record since 2003, called "Find Case Law".
The department is the responsibility of Fiona Twycross, Baroness Twycross, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Museums, Heritage and Gambling, a minister in His Majesty's Government.

Location

The National Archives is based in Kew in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames in south-west London. TNA's original building designed by John Cecil Clavering was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1977 as an additional home for the public records, which were held at the Public Record Office building on Chancery Lane. The site was originally a World War I hospital, which was later used by several government departments. It is near to Kew Gardens Underground station.
Until its closure in March 2008, the Family Records Centre in Islington was run jointly by The National Archives and the General Register Office. The National Archives has an additional office in Norwich, which is primarily for former OPSI staff. There is also an additional record storage facility in the worked-out parts of Winsford Rock Salt Mine, Winsford, Cheshire.

History

The National Archives was created in 2003 by combining the Public Record Office and the Historical Manuscripts Commission and is a non-ministerial department reporting to the Minister of State for digital policy.
On 31 October 2006, The National Archives merged with the Office of Public Sector Information, which itself incorporated the former Her Majesty's Stationery Office, previously part of the Cabinet Office. The name remained The National Archives.

Chief executive and keeper

1991–2005: Sarah Tyacke
2005–2010: Natalie Ceeney
2010–2013: Oliver Morley
2013–2014: Clem Brohier
2014–2024: Jeff James
2024–present: Saul Nassé
Key roles

TNA claims it is "at the heart of information policy—setting standards and supporting innovation in information and records management across the UK, and providing a practical framework of best practice for opening up and encouraging the re-use of public sector information. This work helps inform today's decisions and ensure that they become tomorrow's permanent record."
It has a number of key roles in information policy:

Policy – advising government on information practice and policy, on issues from record creation through to its reuse
Selection – selecting which documents to store
Preservation – ensuring the documents remain in as good a condition as possible
Access – providing the public with the opportunity to view the documents
Advice – advising the public and other archives and archivists around the world on how to care for documents
Intellectual property management – TNA manages crown copyright for the UK
Regulation – ensuring that other public sector organisations adhere to both the public records act and the PSI reuse regulations.
Sector leadership

The National Archives has long had a role of oversight and leadership for the entire archives sector and archives profession in the UK, including local government and non-governmental archives. Under the Public Records Act 1958 it is responsible for overseeing the appropriate custody of certain non-governmental public records in England and Wales. Under the 2003 Historical Manuscripts Commission Warrant it has responsibility for investigating and reporting on non-governmental records and archives of all kinds throughout the United Kingdom. In October 2011, when the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council was wound up, TNA took over its responsibilities in respect of archives in England, including providing information and advice to ministers on archives policy. The National Archives now sees this part of its role as being "to enhance the 'archival health of the nation'".

Collections

Types of records

The National Archives is His Majesty's Government's official archive, "containing 1000 years of history from Domesday Book to the present", with records from parchment and paper scrolls through to digital files and archived websites. The material held at Kew includes the following:

Documents from the central courts of law from the twelfth century onwards, including the Court of King's Bench, the Court of Common Pleas, the Court of Chancery, the Court of Exchequer, the Supreme Court of Judicature, the Central Criminal Court, Assizes, and many other courts
Medieval, early modern and modern records of central government
A large and disparate collection of maps, plans and architectural drawings
Records for family historians including wills, naturalisation certificates and criminal records
Service and operational records of the armed forces War Office, Admiralty etc.
Foreign Office and Colonial Office correspondence and files
Cabinet papers and Home Office records
Statistics of the Board of Trade
The surviving records of the English railway companies, transferred from the British Railways Record Office

There is also a museum, which displays key documents such as Domesday Book and has exhibitions on various topics using material from the collections.

Highlights of the collection

Domesday Book, unique record of medieval England
Final version of Magna Carta, issued by King Henry III
Chest box containing the Treaty of Brétigny, marking the end of the first phase of the Hundred Years' War between England and France
Copy of the first item printed in England by William Caxton
Gold seal of Francis I from the Treaty of Perpetual Peace between France and England
Letter from Sir Francis Drake, Vice-Admiral of the English fleet, to Sir Francis Walsingham during the Spanish Armada
Autographed confession of Guy Fawkes from the Gunpowder Plot
The last will of William Shakespeare with the famous playwright's signature
Manuscript record of Charles I's trial for treason, written by John Phelps
Indictment letter for the notorious highwayman Dick Turpin
Letter from Captain Cook to Philip Stephens, Secretary of the Admiralty prior to Cook's first voyage
Olive Branch Petition from the Second Continental Congress to avert war between the Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain
Three of the 26 extant Dunlap Broadsides, the first printed record of the US Declaration of Independence
Logbook of William Bligh from HMS Bounty with contemporaneous description of the infamous mutiny
Last will of the famous author Jane Austen
Copy of the Treaty of Nanjing
Calling card left by the Marquis of Queensberry for Oscar Wilde that sparked his trial for sodomy
SOS telegram from Jack Phillips alerting the nearby ship SS Birma to the sinking of the Titanic
1 out of about 30 printed copies of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic
Copy of the Treaty of Versailles
Signed letter of abdication by Edward VIII
Access to documents

The collections held by the National Archives can be searched using Discovery, the name given to the online catalogue of the holdings of TNA.
Entrance to The National Archives is free. The Research and Enquiries Room on the first floor contains a large number of desktop computer terminals. In addition, it is possible to bring your own device and to access wi-fi. Close by are the shelves of the reference library. Elsewhere on the first floor and the second floor are the reading room and map room, for conventional and oversized documents respectively. Access to these reading rooms is restricted to those persons with reader tickets, and there are rules on what can be taken in.
Anybody aged 16 or over can access the original documents at the Kew site, after producing two acceptable proofs of identity and being issued a free reader's ticket. The reading rooms have terminals from which documents can be ordered up from secure storage areas by their reference number. The reference number is composed of three sections: the department code of up to four letters, such as WO for the War Office; a series or class number, for the "subcategory" or collection that the document comes from; and an individual document number. Documents can also be ordered several days in advance of a visit.
Once a same-day document order has been placed, The National Archives aims to get it to the reader within 45 minutes. Special arrangements are in place for readers wishing to retrieve large groups of files as bulk orders placed in advance.
As of 2011, some of the most popular documents had been digitised and were available to download from Discovery, for a fee of £3.50 per file, or through co-branded services called licensed Internet associates as pay per view or part of their subscription service. On 22 April 2020, it was announced that a monthly quota of free downloads from Discovery would be made available to registered users, instead of £3.50 per downloaded file. As at August 2023 there are three licensing partners with Licensing Internet Associate agreements still in place: Ancestry.com, Findmypast and TheGenealogist.
A reader's ticket is not needed to access digitised records. Whilst a visitor is on the premises, they can be accessed for free on a terminal, or via a wi-fi connection, where the paywall on the network has been disabled. Frequently accessed documents such as the Abdication Papers had originally been captured on microfilm, as were the aggregated service records for two million First World War soldiers. As part of its digitisation programme, microfilm was eliminated, and replaced by digital files, some of which were free to download.
Researchers are encouraged to check Discovery first, to see if they can get what they want online, via the portal or a third party provider. If a document is available online, The National Archives's policy is to encourage people to use the digital copy and not the original, even if they come to Kew, in order to protect the original from damage. In extreme circumstances, such as where the black and white image of the original was on microfilm, then was transferred to a digital file, and resultant image decay has rendered the finer points illegible, an original document can be retrieved.
It will be clearly stated in the catalogue entry if the record has not been digitised.