London Archives
Reason for nomination
About the London Archives:
We are the regional archive for the Greater London area, managed and funded by the City of London Corporation. Our mission is to preserve and share London’s history for everyone to discover and enjoy. Although we hold the archives of the Square Mile and the City Corporation, we are the sum of many parts and some very significant collections which have been brought together in one service over many years. That includes the archives of the Greater London Council and it’s predecessors, including the London County Record Office, the Middlesex Record Office, Guildhall Library Manuscripts and Prints and Maps and the Corporation of London Records Office. In total, the collections we preserve and share occupy 100km of shelving – laid end to end, our shelves would stretch from London to the white cliffs of Dover!
In 2022 we embarked on a transformation programme. The route out of Covid had been difficult and we recognised that in some areas our audiences had changed. We wanted to address fundamental questions – who we are, what our audiences need from us, how we grow and diversify our audiences and how we improve our services.
We knew that we didn’t have a significant budget to work with and that much of the development we agreed would have to be carried out creatively without reliance on significant expenditure, but we also knew that we had a creative, committed and determined team who would make the most of their skills, and develop new skills to make positive changes with big impact which we could deliver within exisiting resources or very little additional expenditure.
At the end of the 2022/23 business year we came together as a staff group in a series of workshops to reflect on our journey and current position. We developed a new mission statement and vision and focussed on our values and reviewed how we operated at that moment and how we would like to develop in the future.
We followed this with two rounds of audience survey work, which raised a series of key questions with exisiting researchers, visitors and engagement partners, and also a survey group of ‘potential future users’, who were interested in our services and collections but hadn’t visited or engaged with us previously.
The strategic objectives arising from this work formed the basis of our transformation programme (2023/24 to 2027/28) and guide the achievements which we’ve set out in the sections that follow.
Strategic Objectives:
Developing Our Building and Spaces
We will reimagine the public spaces, creating a welcoming and inspiring environment to open the archive to more people, and encourage new ways of using our collections.
Growing Our Audiences
We will develop innovative events, learning programs and exhibitions to engage existing, new and bigger audiences; We will expand our digital offer to open up our collections to a wider audience.
Building Awareness
We will develop better and more coherent strategies for promoting our work to significantly raise our profile and increase engagement with our services and create a clear and engaging brand and identity.
Expanding Our Collections
We will diversify and expand collections, building an archive which reflects London today, rethinking how we catalogue and modernising our systems for digital and physical collections.
Developing Our Colleagues
We will embrace cross team working to enhance skills development, grow our services collaboratively and encourage knowledge sharing.
Why Now?
We’re putting the service forward for the ARA award now to recognise the work of our team in transforming the service since we began the programme in 2023/24, including the work delivered on the programme to change our service name and launch a new identity and branding in August 2024. We feel that this was a very important milestone in the development of the service and the transformation programme, and believe that recognition for the team through the ARA Awards programme would be a be a wonderful way to celebrate their achievements.
We’ve selected five areas of the overall programme to feature in this application – our name and brand change, improvement of our public spaces, work to develop a new website and social media campaign to raise our profile, our redeveloped schools programme and work within our collections teams on inclusive terminology.
A New Name, Brand and Identity
An analysis of feedback received from exisiting and potential users from workshops and surveys highlighted that visitors were confused by the use of the word ‘metropolitan’ in our old name 'London Metropolitan Archives'. Of those surveyed many thought that we held the records of only the Metropolitan Police, London Metropolitan University, or London Underground’s Metropolitan Line. It felt clear to us that the word 'metropolitan' had fallen out of everyday use and didn’t convey the breadth of our collections and what we have to offer.
Through this work we decided ‘The London Archives’ would be our new name as it clearly communicates our collection and core mission, and echoes similar institutions including The National
Archives and the London Museum which would support wider recognition. In late 2023, our team began working with Cog to develop our new brand identity, aiming for a contemporary feel whilst respecting our role as a place for historical research and learning.
Our ambition was to create a name and brand that would be welcoming, open and inspiring, and a visual identity which we hope will ultimately become recognisable and synonymous with the history of London and the knowledge contained within our collections.
The new name, brand and identity was delivered on time, ready for launch in August 2024 and we were absolutely delighted with the results. We felt that it delivered on our aim to create a clear and engaging brand which simplified the ‘introduction’ to our service for the uninitiated.
We’d love our visual identity to develop as a badge of honour for those who use and love our service and as a way of attracting new visitors who love research, history and discovering and exploring the past, and hope that through this work we can play our part in highlighting how essential archives are to our understanding of the city and society around us.
Our Spaces
We knew that our public spaces would benefit from refreshment to improve visitor experience, with a focus on creating a welcoming and inspiring environment for research and engagement with London’s history.
We analysed feedback from the visitor surveys and spent time in the spaces, walking through and using the facilities and discussing what worked and what didn’t. Once the new visual identity was ready, our team focussed on bringing new elements into public areas, in particular adding vibrant colours from the new palette to bring a fresh and vibrant feel. Within the limitations of the spaces, we wanted to bring a real sense of our USP as an archive – to create a clear impression and sense of our purpose and to communicate that visually to visitors when they arrive.
We gave our small entrance area a name and identity, our ‘Welcome’ point, with refreshed visuals and new digital engagement to communicate our work to anyone walking through the door. The changes were not limited to the cosmetic – we also worked across our teams to take a new approach to welcoming visitors, transitioning away from a security focussed check point (which moved further into the public spaces) to a friendly first point of contact able to begin engagement with our collections and services. This was a significant change for our teams, but they took it on with enthusiasm and their usual commitment to excellent customer service, delivering a significant visitor experience improvement.
We applied a much needed update to our visitor rest area, refreshing the look of the space, bringing in new collections displays (part of a new display running through the public spaces) and adding a new coffee offer. The latter, a fully equipped Nespresso coffee station with donation point, was a particularly innovative way to provide visitors with a cup of coffee without taking on a prohibitively expensive lease on a commercial setup.
In our main research areas we applied colours and graphics from the new visual identity, transforming the feel of the spaces with bold colour accents from the new palette. Very much a stage one development, the changes tied the spaces into the new visitor identity to provide a consistent brand experience throughout our public areas.
Our staff EDI forum group created a new detailed ‘Getting Around at The London Archives’ guide to the public spaces, which to published on new website when it launched, enabling visitors to plan their visit in detail before setting off.
Raising Our Profile
We knew however that a new name and brand wouldn’t make meaningful progress against our objective to build awareness without strong marketing support.
In a major milestone for the service, we were able to create a standalone website for the first time, leaving the pages of the wider local authority service in which we had always existed. This was a complex and difficult journey, requiring a lot of internal stakeholder engagement, ensuring that we could leave the local authority site effectively and with the blessing of the wider corporate community.
The standalone site www.thelondonarchives.org was developed by our team in collaboration with the developer of the exisiting local authority site, benefitting from all the structural tools and frameworks already in place but with the ability to implement our new visual identity and create a site which shared our services and collections effectively and improved visitor experience.
From end to end, the development process lasted a year and brought together a variety of team members – an excellent piece of cross team working which included opportunities for skills development and produced a tangible, meaningful outcome which provides an important foundation from which to develop and grow. The new website launched on schedule in August 2024, with our new name, receiving 90,770 visits in the first four months and a 500% increase in page views.
The website was supported by a new approach to social media in a series of campaigns devised by our team in a new content structure focussing on strong visuals, popular themes including ‘then and now’ images and collaborative posts with partners. Video content on Instagram performed particualrly well, helping us to increase our audience size on that platform, with new followers particularly increasing the size of our audience in the 25-44 bracket and supporting our aim to grow and diversify our audiences.
The London Archives launch campaigns attracted 1700 new followers on Instagram from August to the end of the year, a 500% increase on the same period in the previous year.
Schools Programme
Our schools programme is one of the key drivers for our aim to grow and diversify our audiences, bringing young people into the archive to learn about and use the collections.
We paused our the programme in 2023 and embarked on a development project to devise a set of new on site sessions. Our team worked closely with education specialists to identify new ways to structure and deliver the sessions, focussing on direct, interactive engagement with the pupils and visiting archive services with learning programmes to gather inspiration and ideas.
A new set of sessions was developed to include opportunities to get hands on with items from the collections. The Great Fire of London session for Key Stage 1 classes for example gives pupils the opportunity to work with documents produced in the aftermath of the fire, decoding handwriting with our team in gamified activities which focus on engagement.
The team delivered a pilot of sessions between September 2024 and March 2025, running 46 primary and secondary school sessions for 1222 pupils. Feedback received from teachers and pupils has been overwhelmingly positive and we plan to expand the number of sessions available to book, and role out an online booking system this year.
We also refreshed our learning studio, making the choice to end its use as a space for business meetings when not in use by schools and dedicating it only to schools bookings. This allowed us to refresh the décor with bright colours and engaging graphics to create a much more welcoming and familiar environment for visiting students.
We were also able to develop a new document group study space in our main public research room. This self contained glass room gives visiting students and groups a space to work on documents from the collections together within the overall environment of our research spaces, allowing schools to experience and share our public spaces with our research communities.
Heading towards the end of the 2024 academic year, all our school sessions are booked and we’re working on ideas to expand our capacity for September.
Collections Development
Our collections focussed team continued to work on integrating new collections and improving the experience of working with London’s archives. To enable our strategic aim to grow and diversify our audiences, they established an Inclusive Terminology Working Group to foster conversation around decolonisation and inclusive practice.
The aim of the group is to remove harmful or discriminatory terminology from public view. This review includes our catalogue, exhibitions, research guides, website, picture archive, policies and any public content. The working group operates across teams and includes members from our collections and digital, focussing on a collaborative process.
The main objectives of this work include:
Undertaking a critical review of our catalogue and London Picture Archive website to identify and remove harmful and discriminatory language by using preferred terms, adding appropriate content warnings, and enriching descriptions with historical context.
Taking an advisory role responding to feedback from staff and users around harmful language in all areas of work. To develop exhibitions, research guides, webpages, social media, policies and any public content with inclusive descriptive and interpretive practice.
Advocating for ethical inclusive description work internally and externally with staff, archive users, students, and the archives sector.
Making policy improvements to develop sustainable inclusive terminology policies and workflows to embed this into working practice.
So far, the group has:
Updated over 400 instances of harmful language within our catalogue
Incorporated a cultural sensitivity review and added appropriate content warnings when curating exhibitions
Taught seminars with UCL Archives and Records Management students to workshop examples of historic harmful language within our records in November 2023 and 2024
Delivered an Impact Seminar with The National Archives on ‘Building an Inclusive Catalogue’ in 2024
Conclusion
The transformation programme has been a remarkable journey of growth and innovation so far. Despite the challenges posed by limited budget and the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, the team has demonstrated creativity, commitment, and determination in improving and opening up the service to new audiences.
The new name, brand, and identity have successfully addressed previous misconceptions and established a clear and engaging presence. The improvements in public spaces, the development of the standalone website, the refreshed schools programme and the work of the Inclusive Terminology Working Group have all contributed to a more welcoming and inspiring environment for visitors and researchers alike.
As The London Archives continues to evolve, recognition through the ARA Awards scheme would be a fitting tribute to the team's achievements and their ongoing commitment to preserving and sharing London's history.
Supporting evidence of service delivery excellence
Annual Report – 2023/24 (attached)
Feedback from our visitors and service users:
School Groups:
“Just wanted to let you know the kids haven’t stopped telling me about how brilliant the session with you was! Thank you so much for facilitating joy! It’s incredible when children feel so excited to learn and return to spaces where their curiosity has been sparked this way!” – Class Teacher
“The leader of the session adapted the session from student's questions and knowledge extremely well. The resources were engaging and age appropriate, and the session was extremely well structured.” – Class Teacher
“They really enjoyed seeing the real map. The activities were well planned and resourced and it was great that it was a carousel so all children could learn about all aspects.” – Class Teacher
“Varied activities to keep the children interested. Well-paced, resourced and structured. Having the map from Deptford was a nice touch.” – Class Teacher
“What went particularly well - all of it!” – Class Teacher
Event Visitors Feedback:
“The presenter was clearly passionate about the subject and provided an excellent explanation of the key issues.”
“Terrific content presented and interpreted by an engaging and interesting speaker.” “Staff are always so helpful and happy to answer questions about the things on display” “Our guides were very welcoming and informative”
“Host is brilliant at getting great conversation going, sharing their expertise and opinions honestly while making everyone feel included and valued.”
“Staff are very helpful and knowledgeable.”
“The use of interesting real examples and the willingness to answer questions”
Google Reviews:
“I have made many visits in the past 20 years to this valuable and wonderful archive centre. The staff are always so helpful, knowledgeable, and approachable. If you have London ancestry, be sure to pay a visit.”
“Really interesting location with well presented current exhibition and an excellent series of talks and lecture.”
“I came to search for information on smallpox, Dr Ricketts and the hospitals in Darenth. The staff were excellent - very helpful and I found exactly what I was looking for.”
“Great exhibitions and reading rooms if you're into that.. staff are knowledgeable and friendly. Great times”
“Very interesting had a tour and viewed some posters and books ... so much held here amazing”