The National Archives

Overview

The National Archives is non-ministerial department, and the official archive and publisher for the UK Government, and for England and Wales. They are the guardians of over 1,000 years of iconic national documents.

The National Archives is His Majesty’s Government’s official archive, “containing 1000 years of history from Domesday Book to the present”, with records from parchment and paper scrolls through to digital files and archived websites.[20] The material held at Kew includes the following:

• Documents from the central courts of law from the twelfth century onwards, including the Court of King’s Bench, the Court of Common Pleas, the Court of Chancery, the Court of Exchequer, the Supreme Court of Judicature, the Central Criminal Court, Assizes, and many other courts
• Medieval, early modern and modern records of central government
• A large and disparate collection of maps, plans and architectural drawings
• Records for family historians including wills, naturalisation certificates and criminal records
• Service and operational records of the armed forces War Office, Admiralty etc.
• Foreign Office and Colonial Office correspondence and files
• Cabinet papers and Home Office records
• Statistics of the Board of Trade
• The surviving records of (mainly) the English railway companies, transferred from the British Railways Record Office

There is also a museum, which displays key documents such as Domesday Book and has exhibitions on various topics using material from the collections