Search the blog

Fittingly for our brand new platform, this week we are delighted to welcome five brand new titles to The Archive, with a total of 261,496 pages joining us in all. That's not it either, from across the UK and Ireland and even further afield, we've updated 46 of our existing titles. And as we voyage into these new waters, using our brand new shipping title, we explore the launches of some notable liners and merchant vessels from the late 19th and early…

This week at The Archive we are marking St Patrick’s Day with the addition of five brand new Irish titles, and updates to 29 of our existing Irish titles, as we delve into a potential Oscar Wilde work, where all is not as it seems. Furthermore, in all, we’ve added 215,303 brand new pages to our collection, as The Archive continues to grow.So read on to discover more about our new and updated titles of the week, and also to read…

This week at The Archive we are delighted to welcome a brand new title from the sunny south coast, the Bournemouth Times and Directory, as we take a moment to remember the devastating Bournemouth Blitz. In all, over the last seven days, we’ve added 366,686 brand new pages to our collection, whilst we’ve updated 25 of our existing titles from across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.So, from Buckingham to Burnley, from Dingwall to Driffield, from Mid Sussex to Mid Ulster, read…

This week at The Archive we’re delighted to welcome one brand new newspaper title to our collection, namely Yorkshire’s Hebden Bridge Times, alongside a total of 245,806 brand new pages. Meanwhile, from Derbyshire to Dunstable, from Eastbourne to Earlestown, from Thame to Todmorden, we have updated 15 of our existing titles from across England and Scotland.So read on to learn more about all of our new and updated titles of the week, as well as to discover more about poet laureate…

We’ve reached the extraordinary landmark of 72 million pages all now available to search on The Archive, as we welcome new title the Carrick Times and East Antrim Times to our collection, and celebrate the town of Carrickfergus’s links with poet and playwright Louis MacNeice. That’s not all, we’ve added 152,092 brand new pages to The Archive in all over the last seven days, with new pages joining publications from across Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.So read on to discover more…

In December 1920 the world’s first illustrated weekly news magazine the Illustrated London News delved into the ‘curiosities and ingenuities‘ of the Patent Office, featuring some of Britain’s most unusual rejected patents.Illustrated by the publication’s own artist W.B. Robinson, the Illustrated London News presented a series of the bizarre designs that had been submitted to the Patent Office, but had since ‘lain dormant.’We at The Archive were keen to delve into our collection’s cabinet of curiosities, and these rejected…

Mercedes Gleitze (1900-1981) was the first British woman to swim the English Channel, and the first person to swim the Straits of Gibraltar. In an amazing career that spanned the 1920s and 1930s, Mercedes captured the imagination of the British public and became a household name.Born to German parents in Brighton, Mercedes was one of three sisters. Skilled in languages, she moved to London where she worked as a secretary and stenographer. Whilst living in London she began swimming in…

The work of poet, mystic and painter William Blake was largely unrecognised in his lifetime. The son of a dissenting hosier, Blake was born in London’s Soho in 1757, and was apprenticed to an engraver at a young age. Hostile to organised religion, he created an array of paintings and poetry, often inspired by his visions, before he passed away in 1827.In this special blog, we will take a look at the evolving attitudes to the art of William Blake. We…

In the decade after the Second World War had come to an end, and indeed beyond, many communities across the United Kingdom were faced with very vivid reminders of the conflict: bomb sites, the country’s ‘war scars.’In this blog, we will examine how people in Britain lived alongside bomb sits in the 1950s, using newspapers taken from The Archive. We will explore how communities adapted to live beside bomb sites, and how they transformed them into gardens and playgrounds.…

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…