The theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911 is one of the art world’s most sensational crimes. The Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece was taken, almost in plain sight, from its place in the Louvre, Paris, with very few clues as to the identity of its thief left behind.In this special blog, we will tell the story of the theft of the Mona Lisa through our newspapers, as the crime filled newspaper columns across the world. We will draw on our…

This week we return from a publishing hiatus having added a mammoth 1,610,356 brand new pages to our Archive, and it’s an especially great week for Grimsby too, as we’ve added one brand new title for the Lincolnshire town, and also extensively updated the Grimsby Daily Telegraph. All of these additions mean we have now surpassed a landmark 65 million pages on The Archive.This week also sees the addition of a further three new titles to our collection, from Camberley, Luton…

This week at The Archive we have a South London special for you, with three brand new newspaper titles joining us from the likes of Croydon and Southwark. Meanwhile, we’ve added 360,986 brand new pages in total to our collection over the past seven days, with five brand new titles being welcomed to The Archive in all.We’ve not neglected our existing newspaper titles either. From Gloucester to Grimsby, from Plymouth to Port Talbot, from Stirling to Sevenoaks, we’ve updated 68 of…

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…

This week at The Archive we have reached yet a another milestone, as we now have a total of over 58 million pages all now available to search, just four weeks after we brought up our last million. Meanwhile, we have added 206,866 brand new pages over the past seven days, with one brand new title, the Eastern Argus and Borough of Hackney Times, joining us, with updates to 35 of our existing titles from across England, Wales and Scotland.So read on…

The disappearance of Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, following the murder of his children’s nanny Sandra Rivett and the attack of his wife Veronica, in November 1974, is one of the most notorious unsolved mysteries in British criminal history.In this special blog, we will explore how his disappearance was reported on by the British press, using newspapers taken from our Archive. We will explore the newspaper reports from the days after the murder, whilst examining the press coverage…

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 late August and early September 1958, the London area of Notting Hill was the scene of racially motivated riots, in which white, working-class, ‘Teddy Boys,’ and others, displayed hostility and violence to the Black community in the area.These riots took place ten years after HMT Empire Windrush arrived in Tilbury Docks, carrying 492 Caribbean migrants. Since that moment in history, more and more migrants arrived in Britain from the Caribbean, and they would come to be known as the ‘Windrush…

The British Newspaper Archive is a fantastic resource for local history, and in particular, it can be very useful in researching the history of your street.In this special blog, we will give you all the hints and tips you will need to start your own research into your road, whilst also examining the story of one of London’s lesser known historic streets, which was once a pathway of pilgrims before becoming one of the city’s most notorious slums.So…

Over the past seven days at The Archive we have added 117,702 brand new pages, with eleven brand new newspaper titles joining us over this period alone. We have added three new local titles (from Wiltshire, Buckinghamshire and Kent respectively), with eight of our new titles this week coming from the British Library’s Heritage Made Digital programme.So read on to discover more about all of our new newspapers of the week (which include amongst them four Victorian illustrated papers), as…