Search the blog

This week you might just be able to witness steam coming off our presses, as we have added an impressive 343,381 brand new pages to The Archive, with 22 brand new titles joining us this week alone. Comprising of special interest titles devoted to music and the cinema, as well as to different spheres of employment, from postal work to pawnbroking, our new titles this week are an eclectic mix, comprising also the regional and the international, covering the latest from both…

Imagine yourself back in December 1925, with Christmas fast approaching, in London where:All the pavements are alive this week with purchasers moving in ceaseless procession from window to window as they search for the particular Christmas gift for the particular person who is to receive it. They wander down street after street, for London nowadays is the finest city in which to purchase a gift – humble, rich, or rare – that the world knows.It’s time for Christmas shopping, and there’s…

By November 1920, some ‘three millions of money‘ had been spent on ‘memorials of various kinds and designs…in the United Kingdom,’ as reported the Milngavie and Bearsden Herald. In today’s money, that’s roughly £87,000,000 – the equivalent of £2 donated by every person in Britain.The strength of the nation’s desire to remember their war dead is manifested in these memorials, as the population struggled to come to terms with the great losses suffered during the First World War, in which 744,000 men lost their…

This week at The Archive we have added 99,778 brand new pages, with seven brand new special interest titles joining our collection over the past seven days, which provide an incredible snapshot of early twentieth century culture. From cars to yachts, from movies to the modern man, our new titles this week furnish an exciting panorama of what life was like over one hundred years ago.Meanwhile, we have extensive updates to some of our existing titles, with over 50,000 pages being…

This week at The Archive we have been busy adding an incredible 167,444 brand new pages to our collection, with nineteen new titles added in all. And this week’s new titles have an especially Scottish theme, with a lucky thirteen new titles added from Scotland alone over the past seven days.Meanwhile, we have added six historic London titles, digitised as part of the British Library’s Heritage Made Digital programme, and updated fifteen of our existing newspaper titles, including pages from…

Nowadays, we tend to think of Halloween as a thoroughly modern phenomenon, an American Hallmark holiday. But using newspapers from the Victorian era, accessed through The Archive, we will discover in this blog how Halloween is a thoroughly ancient phenomenon.We will look at the ancient origins of the October festival, and explore its traditions, some of which have lasted through to this day, like bobbing for apples, and others that have fallen by the wayside, for example the day’s…

…the credence in the phenomena of Spiritualism is very general. In fact, it is popular. Belief is common. It is widespread. It exists amongst all sorts of people, from the highest to the lowest. You find it in Mayfair and you find it in the remotest village.from ‘The Popularity of Spiritualism,’ The Globe, 29 December 1919By the end of 1919, belief in Spiritualism was ‘spreading like wildfire.’ Spiritualism is defined as a relatively modern religion that is based on the beliefs…

Nearly one hundred years ago athletes Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell took the Olympic Games and the world by storm, their heroics on the track immortalised in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire.But how were Abrahams’s and Liddell’s record-breaking feats reported on in the newspapers of the time? Were they celebrated in, say, the same way we celebrate our sporting heroes of today? In this special blog, we will explore the headlines behind the real Chariots of Fire, and in…

This week at The Archive we have added a century’s worth of news, spanning the headlines from 1864 to 1964. We have added 90,176 new newspaper pages in all, with six brand new titles joining us from England and Wales over the past seven days.So read on to discover more about our new titles, from Hastings to Harborne, from Neath to Stockton, as well as to find out which of our existing titles we have updated during the past week. Using our…

We’re welcoming the New Year at the British Newspaper Archive with a swathe of brand new titles, eight in all, as the presses have continued to whirr over the Christmas period. Over the past fortnight we have added 180,462 brand new pages, with new titles spanning England, Scotland, Wales and beyond.So read on to find out about the 115 years’ worth of headlines we have added, as well as to discover which new titles have joined our Archive, and how the…