About the Archives
What do we do?
The 1807 Act to abolish the slave trade is just one of the important documents looked after by the Parliamentary Archives. Some of the others include the Death Warrant of King Charles I and the 1689 Bill of Rights. You might be surprised to know that stranger items include a gravestone submitted as evidence in a peerage claim, and a specimen from an oil slick which was collected by a House of Commons Committee.
All in all, the Archives has custody of more than three million records relating to the history and workings of Parliament, with the oldest dating back to 1497.
All these official records of activities in the House of Lords and the House of Commons, such as original Acts of Parliament, committee papers and much more are accessible to the public.
Among the other collections significant to Parliament that the Archives has are the private papers of Lloyd George, for example, and plans produced by Sir Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin for the new Palace of Westminster.
So making these records available and answering questions about them is an important part of our job, but it's not all of it. For instance, we also have to take steps to make sure that the documents in our care remain in good condition, and sometimes we have to repair them - to do this we have a special team of people who have these skills. There is also a constant stream of new deposits that have to be dealt with and catalogued. Then there is what we call outreach - telling people about the records we have, and making them available on websites like this one.
The archives of Parliament are different from the archives of Government - the latter are held at the National Archives , Kew. Go to the Parliamentary Archives website for a full rundown of the collections.
Architects Barry and Pugin were employed after the old Palace of Westminster burned down in 1834. For this reason only a few records from the House of Commons have survived from before this date, as they were destroyed in the fire. However, the new Palace, opened in 1852 by Queen Victoria, included the Victoria Tower, specifically designed to store the records of both Houses.
