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A thousand years of the state's own paperwork in a 1970s block beside a lake at Kew, from Domesday Book to last century's census, free to enter and free to read.
Free
The Public Record Office was set up in 1838 to gather the records of government from the Tower, the Rolls Chapel and a dozen damp store rooms into one building on Chancery Lane, and in 1977 the Queen opened its successor at Kew, a hard-edged concrete block by the government's own architects on the site of a First World War hospital, with a glass wing added in the 1990s; the Office became The National Archives in 2003. It holds the records of the English and then the British state for a thousand years: Domesday Book of 1086, Shakespeare's will, Guy Fawkes's confession with its broken signature, the census returns, Cabinet minutes, war diaries and the files on flying saucers. Anyone may walk in. The ground floor has a gallery of changing exhibitions drawn from the shelves, a bookshop and a café looking over the ponds, and a reader's ticket, issued on the spot to anyone with two proofs of identity, lets you order the original documents to a desk upstairs and turn the pages yourself.
| Monday | Closed |
|---|---|
| Tuesday | 09:00 – 19:00 |
| Wednesday | 09:00 – 17:00 |
| Thursday | 09:00 – 19:00 |
| Friday | 09:00 – 17:00 |
| Saturday | 09:00 – 17:00 |
| Sunday | 11:00 – 16:00 |
Hours from the page that lists them, checked 8 September 2026.
Closed Mondays and on English bank holidays. The reading rooms keep their own hours and close on Sundays.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.