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At The Archive this week we are delighted to announce that we have hit another milestone, as we are now at over 97 million pages all available to search, as we embrace spooky season and find out how to throw a 1950s style Halloween party. That’s not all, we’ve added another 256,448 brand new pages to our collection, with five brand new titles and updates to seven of our existing titles from across the UK.And so, read on to discover more…

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…

As it’s the height of spooky season we’re exploring the history of Halloween at The Archive, with the help of the 93,381 brand new pages that we have added to our collection over the last seven days. Meanwhile, we’re delighted to welcome one brand new newspaper title to The Archive, which is the Middlesex & Surrey Gazette, whilst we have made exciting updates to some of our existing titles from across Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.So read on to discover more…

A walk along Piccadilly in the black-out is one of the many queer experiences of this war. The once brilliant centre of London’s night life is now as dark as any forest, and indeed, like a forest, the darkness is full of rustlings and whisperings, of half-seen shapes, and of a sinister feeling of eager, but invisible, life.So began a Daily Herald article on blackout crime in London during the Second World War. With blackouts imposed across the United…

Long before Agatha Christie envisioned murder on the Orient Express, or before she wondered what might have taken place on the 4.50 from Paddington, murder, mystery and mayhem were already well established on the railways of Britain and beyond.The first victim of murder on British railways was 70-year-old Thomas Briggs. In this special blog, we will take a look at his story, as well as nine others sourced from the pages of our newspaper Archive, which tell the strange, the…

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 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…

With spooky season now upon us, we thought we’d scour the pages of The Archive to find some of the most spine-chilling ghost stories ever published in our newspapers.So settle in and prepare to be scared by tales of ghostly armies, inexplicable apparitions and portents from the afterlife, all of which have been featured in the pages of the newspapers to be found on The Archive.Want to learn more? Register now and explore The Archive1. An Army of…

This week at The Archive we have added nearly 180 years of historic headlines, with 167,302 brand new pages joining us, spanning the years 1820 all the way through to 1999. We have four very exciting new titles joining us this week too, with additions to our collection of international newspapers, as well as to our Irish and national holdings.Read on to discover more about our new titles, the updates we have made to our existing publications, as well as one of the…