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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…

Here at The Archive, we love to learn of the discoveries you have made through our newspaper pages, and how you have used them, whether they have influenced novels, or provided information for dissertations. We were incredibly grateful, therefore, when crime writer and athletics historian Peter Lovesey contacted us with his account of sixty years of researching newspapers. From accessing historical newspapers in their original form, to scrolling through microfilm reels, and finally to searching newspapers digitally on the British…

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…

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…

We are taking a deep dive into the work of Una Marson.  Marson was one of Jamaica’s most influential poets, broadcasters, and activists.  She was a feminist pioneer and the first Black woman employed by the BBC.  She was also the first Black woman to have her play performed in the West End and the first Black woman to attend the League of Nations.  One blog post cannot do justice to her incredible career, but we hope to use The…

THROUGH thy battlements, Newstead, the hollow winds whistle;Thou, the hall of my fathers, art gone to decay;In thy once smiling garden the hemlock and thistleHave choked up the rose which late bloomed in the way.So wrote the poet Lord Byron, inspired by his ancestral home of Newstead Abbey. Using pages from the British Newspaper Archive, this blog will explore Byron’s affinity with the ancient building, and how Newstead Abbey beat the odds to survive until the…

This week we have added 70,450 new pages to The Archive, with two new and very important titles joining us from home and abroad.We have added an extensive run of pages to the Westminster Gazette, which was seen by some as ‘the most powerful paper in Britain.’ Established in 1893 by E.T. Cook, the Westminster Gazette was a liberal newspaper, which found its audience in London’s gentlemen’s clubs and was consequently known as a ‘clubland paper.’ Despite this audience being small,…

I know a land where the wild flowers grow Near, near at hand if by train you go, Metro-land. Metro-land.The above pre-First World War verse written by George R Sims coined the phrase ‘Metro-land’ – that area of north west of Wembley served by what was then called the Metropolitan Railway, and is now known as the Metropolitan Line.In this blog, using articles found on the British Newspaper Archive, we will explore how the Metropolitan Railway shaped London’s suburbs,…

The British Newspaper Archive is an unrivalled resource when it comes to tracing local history. Where else would you find millions of forgotten stories from your street, town or city all documented and ready to be discovered? Take Birmingham for example. The Archive contains over 50,000 pages and and a varied range of titles from the UK’s ‘Second City’ and this guide will show you how to make the most of them.Register now and view Birmingham newspapers for FREEYou…