This essay inaugurates One British Archive, a new series in the Journal of British Studies. This short essay describes the little-known archive, libraries, and museum of Stonyhurst College in England. Stonyhurst represents a continuation of the College of St Omers, a Catholic institution started in continental Europe in the sixteenth century, when Catholics were routinely prosecuted in England. This transnational quality of British expatriate communities in Europe is reflected in the collections. The modern preparatory school contains not only the records of St Omers but also the papers and books of numerous local families and school children that passed through its doors. The current archive, libraries, and museum are thus a treasure trove for anyone pursuing studies into Catholicism, book history, British education, and more.

This article introduces the open access ArcGIS database Weather Extremes in England's Little Ice Age, 1500–1700. The database maps narrative weather records from a range of sources, including historical chronicles, personal diaries, and extreme weather pamphlets. A source of particular note is the manuscript commonplace book of Richard Shann (1561–1627), a Catholic copyholder from Methley, Yorkshire. Shann included his weather notations in two distinct sections, with the first transcribing events between 1617–27, and the second, between 1586–1622. Falling between the genres of chronicle and diary, these records provide a sustained perspective on local weather conditions. In their turn-of-the-century focus, they also help to clarify the specific impact of the Little Ice Age on England, as their local observations reflect a national trend wherein seventeenth-century weather becomes not only more cold but also more unstable.

Edible goods are not usually considered suitable for archiving. This short article introduces an unconventional archive of images relating to design, book, costume, and performance history. Each image in this archive depicts an intricately decorated biscuit (cookie) set inspired by historical artifacts or styles. I began making these biscuits during the pandemic as a way of engaging with material culture while traditional archives and museums were closed, and I now perform this work as a form of close reading. I also collaborate with heritage organizations to make biscuit sets that share collection items with online audiences. This work has contributed to my own research process while celebrating the collections of a broad range of British archives.

Modern gravestones have been a common sight in European towns and cities for just over three hundred years. They provide a wealth of information beyond simply names and dates, and can teach us a great deal about the time and place in which they were erected and the people who built them. I have been recording and conserving gravestones for fifteen years, and here I present some of the techniques, sources, and hard-learned lessons of using gravestones as archival material that will enable you to see your local graveyard in a whole new light.

This article discusses the University of Kansas’s Kenneth Spencer Research Library as an unexpectedly rich resource for British and Irish studies. The library’s location in Lawrence, Kansas, at a distance from the coastal research corridors, means that its collections tend to be underexplored, despite their significance. Spencer Library’s strength in eighteenth-century British imprints is complemented by extensive manuscript holdings. Among these are several centuries of estate papers for Britain’s prominent North family, and manuscripts documenting the Asiento (agreement) and England’s trade in supplying captive Africans to Spanish colonies in the Americas in the papers of Arthur Moore. Particularly noteworthy is the library of writer, civil servant, and Irish nationalist P. S. O’Hegarty, which offers scholars an unparalleled resource for Anglo-Irish relations and Irish history, culture, and politics. O’Hegarty’s collecting of scarce and ephemeral material, on the one hand, and books with significant provenance, on the other, makes his library a valuable resource for researchers even in an age of digitized text.

On 18 June 2024, a fire devastated Block D of the Barbados Department of Archives (BDA), destroying irreplaceable local governance and health records. This disaster underscores the fragility of Caribbean archives, which face chronic underfunding, aging infrastructure, and climatic threats such as humidity, pests, and mold. Barbados’s documentary heritage is dispersed across local and global repositories. While digitization offers improved access, it cannot replace original records and introduces new risks of technological obsolescence and cost barriers. Post-pandemic, the BDA fire and closures of other local repositories disrupted research access for over a year, reminding us that archives need to be accessible for safeguarding national memory and governance. This article places the BDA fire within a larger context of regional vulnerabilities and examines policy gaps in disaster risk reduction (DRR) for Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in archives management. It argues for integrated strategies that balance modernization with conservation, prioritize cultural heritage in national planning, and strengthen collaboration among professional heritage managers in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM). Sustained investment and transparent reporting are essential to protect and manage Barbados’s archives.

Three decades after the Good Friday Agreement, repositories such as the Linen Hall Library in Belfast have built collections that explore the impact of sectarian violence and the path to peace. While the Northern Ireland Political Collection is a must for any scholar of The Troubles, the library is also filled with resources for British scholars in a number of areas. One such innovative resource – the ExtraORDINARY Women collection – helps scholars answer questions of how gender history interacts with contemporary and local political history. The collection documents the history of a range of women's political and civil rights in holdings that range from 1965 to the present.

This article introduces the scope, content, and capabilities of a new born-digital archive. The Medieval Londoners Database (MLD) uses an online platform to collect from and connect to both documents (printed and archival) and digitized resources (such as British History Online and the History of Parliament Online). As a digital prosopography, MLD is a freely available resource that offers sophisticated search options to discover more about the lives of both the civic elite and ordinary individuals who resided in the city of London or its suburbs of Southwark and Westminster between ca. 1100 and 1520. MLD exemplifies how digitization and the semantic web enhance historical research by creating super-powered archival collections that are ever-expanding, accessible via multiple entry points, and able to facilitate highly analytical research.

This article discusses the archives of Westbourne Park Baptist Church in London and its world-renowned pastor in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Dr. John Clifford. As leader of the National Passive Resistance League, the fiery Clifford came to be synonymous with the Nonconformist conscience at the height of its political influence in the early twentieth century. The article foregrounds the tension between what I call archival intimacy and archival precarity, while analyzing the power of seeing the diverse photographs in this collection as evidence of the gendered politics of passive resistance in the early twentieth century. Some— though not all—of the collection that I consulted at Westbourne Park Baptist Church in 2016 has now been transferred to the Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford.

This short article describes the content and impact of the files related to the Watson Commission, a commission of enquiry empowered by British colonial government officials to investigate the causes and consequences of the riots that rocked the city of Accra (Gold Coast Colony) in 1948. They comprise a collection of reports and testimonies from a wide range of people from across the social, economic, and political spectrum of the colonial Gold Coast. In a colonial archive that often privileges the voices of British government officials, technocrats, and African politicians, this collection of 32 files represents an unprecedented insight into the lived experience of a wide range of individuals and communities, and documents the processes that led to independence for the nation-state of Ghana.

This short article describes some of the archival materials held at Shulbrede Priory, located in West Sussex, England. This private home in Haslemere also serves as an archive containing materials related to the Ponsonby family and presents exciting research opportunities for historians of early twentieth-century Britain. The collection includes material related to the composer Hubert Parry and the diaries of Arthur and Dorothea Ponsonby. Additionally, it contains manuscript and photographic materials related to the Ponsonby's daughter, Elizabeth—particularly her involvement with the so-called Bright Young People of the 1920s and 1930s. As it remains a private home, this archive also compels us to think about the nature of family histories.