Christmas opening times

Posted on 2 December 2015

We're making lots of preparations here ahead of the festive season with a few early presents in store if you can’t wait until the 25th!

If you’re planning on visiting us over the festive season, our microfilm resources will be available every day over Christmas barring Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's’ Day. The microfilm room will close at 4:00pm on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.

Our searchroom will be open for you to consult our original documents until 4:45pm on the 23rd December and then re-open at 9:15am on the 4th January. Additionally, many of our Parish registers, Bishops’ Transcripts and Marriage Bonds and Allegations are available via Find My Past; and our Cause Papers are available 24/7 online too.

We will also be holding our annual collections development week on from the 14th to the 18th December. This is an opportunity for staff in the archives to carry out some essential tasks which enable the smooth running of the searchroom when we are open and to allow us to undertake in-depth work on collections in our care.

In order to reduce potential disruption to our service, we schedule this in the run up to Christmas when we typically have less visitors to the archives. Although our searchroom and reception will be closed, our microfilm resources will be available as usual.

While you may not be able to visit the archives in person, please do keep an eye on our social media throughout December. We will be sharing lots of festive images from the archives in the run up to Christmas via twitter and facebook.

Just one example of the festive images we have in the archives is the website home page banner image for December. This is an image of the Nativity from a 15th century Book of Hours, part of the Takamiya manuscript fragments archive (ref TAK/3/5).

We would like to wish all of our users a very Happy Christmas and we look forward to seeing you in 2016.