The National Archives at Kew is the closest thing Britain has to a single great repository of the national memory.
Housed in a large modern building beside the Thames in southwest London, it holds approximately eleven million records spanning a thousand years — the accumulated paperwork of central government, the courts, the armed forces, and a great deal else besides.
For local historians, it is not always the first port of call. The county record office, as we’ve discussed, holds most of the records created at a local level. But there are categories of document that only Kew can provide, and knowing what they are — and how to get at them — is an important part of the researcher’s toolkit.
What The National Archives actually holds
The holdings of The National Archives are the records of central government and its agencies. This sounds dry. In practice, it means an almost bewildering variety of material.
Census returns for England and Wales from 1841 to 1921 are held here — though for practical purposes most researchers access these through Ancestry or FindMyPast rather than visiting in person. Military service records for the First and Second World Wars are held here, along with campaign medal records, pension records, and operational diaries of military units. Court records (including those of the assize courts, which dealt with serious criminal cases across England and Wales) are held here going back centuries. Records of the Chancery, the Exchequer, and the various departments of state stretch back to the Norman Conquest.
For local historians, a handful of record series deserve particular attention.
Maps and surveys
The National Archives holds one of the finest collections of historical maps in the world. The tithe maps of England and Wales, produced under the 1836 Tithe Commutation Act, are held here in the series IR 30, alongside their apportionments in IR 29. These are the originals; county record offices typically hold office copies. Both sets are equally usable, but Kew’s copies are generally in better condition.
The Maps Department also holds military and Ordnance Survey maps going back to the eighteenth century, estate maps submitted to government departments, railway plans deposited with parliament, and a range of other cartographic material of great value to local historians.
Military records
If your local history project touches on the First World War, The National Archives is essential. The series WO 363 and WO 364 contain what survives of the service records for soldiers of the First World War. A fire at the War Office repository in 1940 destroyed around sixty percent of these records, which is a loss that local historians feel keenly. But the survivors are here, and they can be searched online via the Ancestry military records collection.
The Medal Rolls index, which records the medal entitlements of every soldier who served in the First World War, is available free on The National Archives website. It is often the quickest way to confirm that a named individual did indeed serve, and to establish which unit they were in — the starting point for further research.
Officers’ service records are considerably better preserved than those of other ranks, and many have been digitised. The operational war diaries of every army unit — the day-by-day record of what a battalion or regiment did during the war — are held in the series WO 95, and the majority are now available online via The National Archives’ own document download service.
Court records and legal documents
The assize court records held at Kew are among the most vivid documents available to local historians of the criminal past. The assizes, the twice-yearly visits of judges from London to try serious criminal cases in each county, generated indictments, depositions, and verdicts that name specific people, describe specific crimes, and sometimes contain detailed witness statements of remarkable immediacy.
The series ASSI covers assize records for England and Wales from the sixteenth century onwards. They are not fully indexed, which means that finding a specific case requires some knowledge of which circuit and which year you’re looking at — but the Discovery catalogue allows you to search at the series level, and the records themselves, once located, are extraordinary.
Using the Discovery catalogue
The gateway to everything at Kew is the Discovery catalogue, available at nationalarchives.gov.uk. It is searchable by keyword, by date, by record series, and by creating body. A search for a specific place name (say, “Burnley” or “Bromley”) will return references from across dozens of different record series, some of which you would never have thought to look at.
The catalogue records are descriptions, not the documents themselves. For many record series, the original documents can only be seen in person at Kew. Some have been digitised and can be downloaded for a small fee through the website. A growing number are available free through partner platforms like Ancestry and FindMyPast.
Visiting in person
Kew is open to all, free of charge, but requires advance registration for a reader’s ticket. Document ordering is done online in advance, via the catalogue — you can order up to twelve items before your visit, which appear in the reading room when you arrive. The reading room itself is large, well lit, and thoroughly equipped with microfilm readers, light tables, and staff who know their collections in depth.
If you are travelling any distance to Kew, plan your visit carefully. Order your documents in advance. Give yourself a full day at minimum. The catalogue is large enough that many researchers find references to new series they want to explore once they’re there, and the temptation to order additional items is considerable.
Kew is not where every local history project ends up. But for military research, legal history, national government records with local dimensions, and cartographic sources, it is irreplaceable.
It is also, in its way, rather magnificent. Eleven million records. A thousand years. The whole complicated business of the British state, filed away in acid-free boxes in a building beside the Thames.
It’s worth the trip.