Guest blog by Dr Elizabeth Hallam Smith In June 2023 Parliament celebrates 250 years since the opening of the famous Bellamy’s Kitchen and Refreshment Rooms, which from 1773 to 1851 comprised Parliament's main catering outfit. Here MPs, peers and their …
By Mari Takayanagi, Senior Archivist The Parliamentary Archives recently acquired a wonderful new suffragette photograph! It shows suffragettes from the Women's Freedom League (WFL) pasting a Proclamation on a board advertising Hackney Carriage Prices. The two women are Barbara Duval …
In our Archive, there are certain private collections so large given the task of writing a blog about one of these individuals its hard to know where to start… For this reason, I’ve come up with a plan to streamline …
This blog was written by Katherine Emery, Assistant Archives Officer. Westminster Hall was originally built during the reign of William II in 1097 but most of the Hall and its iconic roof we know today is from the repairs, redesign, …
Eighty years have passed since the soothing sound of By the Sleeping Lagoon was first heard across our airwaves as the theme tune to the debut episode of BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs. A multitude of MPs and Peers …
The writer F Scott Fitzgerald memorably once said that ‘There are no second acts in American life’. Thankfully Christopher Chataway was British and didn’t adhere one iota to that maxim. Mirroring the standard structure of a theatrical play his …
‘We all have a book in us’ as the saying goes. There are some long-forgotten manuscripts in our collections written by various individuals that unfortunately never had the glory of going to print. A red-ribboned bundle titled In the House …
This blog explores several petitions from early 1621 which tell the story of accusations, evading arrest warrants, eventual arrests, and imprisonment in the infamous Fleet Prison. The two main characters of this tale are Jeffrey Passmore, a wax chandler, otherwise …
What is… Longer than the length of three football fields? 200 years old? And made of animal skin? It's the Longest Act! To give it its proper title, it's the Land Tax Commissioners' Act 1821, which at 348 metres is …
An influx of rookie MPs entered the House of Commons after the post-war 1945 General Election. One of the new intakes was the celebrated playwright, Benn Levy who’d won the Eton & Slough seat for the victorious Labour Party. …
