The London Archives

The London Archives functions as the collective memory of the city, housing over seventy-two miles of records that chronicle nearly a thousand years of urban life. The oldest document in the collection is a charter from ten sixty-seven, signed by William the Conqueror just months after the Norman invasion, which formally guaranteed the rights of the city's citizens. The building you are approaching, located on Northampton Road, was not originally designed as a repository for historical treasures. It served as a busy print works for the Temple Press for several decades before being adapted in the early nineteen eighties to house the city's expanding governmental and historical records.