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This week at The Archive we’re delighted to welcome 202,948 brand new pages to our collection, as we mark 135 years since the opening of the new Battersea Bridge, which was designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette. Meanwhile, we’ve added four brand new titles and updated nine of our existing ones, from across the British Isles and Ireland.So read on to discover more about all of our new and updated titles of the week, as well as to learn more about the…

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…

At the British Newspaper Archive we are always delighted to hear how The Archive has been used to inform a range of different research interests. In this very special guest blog, Sidonia Serafini of Georgia College & State University and Barbara McCaskill of the University of Georgia take a look at the work of the Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford, Birmingham’s first Black minister, as reported in the British press, through the newspapers to be found in our collection.In March 1883, Reverend…

We are at The Archive are deeply saddened by the passing of Her Majesty The Queen. During her seven decades on the throne, she witnessed great change. With her calm determination, her sparkling humour and an unwavering sense of duty, she stood as a beacon of constancy and comfort to millions.To honour the memory of the late Queen, we have looked back at her extraordinary life through our newspapers, from when she was born, when her destiny was set…

From South Shields to Saint Lucia, from Carmarthen to Canada, we’ve added 155,351 brand new pages to The Archive this week, spanning over 180 years of headlines. Furthermore, we’ve updated eighteen of our existing titles, with updates covering our regional titles from England, Scotland and Wales, as well as some of our international titles from Canada and the Caribbean.So read on to discover more about our updated titles of the week, as well as to learn about the bombing of a…

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 at The Archive is a very special one, as today on the 29 November 2021 we celebrate our tenth birthday! It is ten years since we launched the British Newspaper Archive, and to celebrate this decade of digitising newspapers, we have added ten brand new titles to our collection, as well as updating ten of our existing titles, numbering 114,064 brand new pages in all.So read on to find out more about all of our new ten titles, which hail…

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…

Nicknamed the ‘Idle Women,’ although they were about as far from idle as anybody could possibly be, the women canal workers of the Second World War performed vital war work which is all but forgotten today, some seventy years later.Some of the ‘Idle women’ arriving at a canal dock | The Sphere | 15 April 1944The curious name of ‘Idle Women’ came from the badges that these pioneering women wore, with the initials ‘IW,’ which stood for ‘Inland Waterways’. This moniker, given…

On 16 January 1867 Regent’s Park in London was witness to the worst ice-skating tragedy in British history. In this special blog post, we take a look at how the newspapers in our Archive can help us understand exactly what happened that day, by hearing from the voices of those who were caught up in the catastrophe.In the Luton Times & Advertiser, 19 January 1867, the following is described:At about a quarter-past four, when a large number of persons were skating and sliding…