Our collections

Jump to:

Council records

Records of official bodies

Deposited collections

Newspapers

Books and pamphlets

Ephemera

Reference collections

Maps and plans

Images

Council records

At the core of our collections are the records of Bath City Council (later Bath & North East Somerset Council).

We hold the original charters, minutes, leases, rate books and a wide range of other records of the Corporation and the Council from 1189 to the present day.

Hospitals

We hold records for a number of hospitals in the Bath area and for those which were within the Bath District Health Authority. These include the Royal United Hospital, Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases (Mineral Water Hospital), St Martin's Hospital, Bath Eye Infirmary, Claverton Down Isolation Hospital and other smaller hospitals.

Most of the hospital records we hold have only a basic catalogue and are in process of being re-organised.

Police

Bath City Police Force was set up in 1836 following the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, which required boroughs to organise and maintain a police force. We hold police records and the administration of criminal justice in the City of Bath until the 1960s at ref 0661/.

Schools

School admission registers can be a useful source of information for family historians. However, only a small number of registers have been deposited in the Record Office.

Bath & West of England Society

Bathwick Estate Company

The Manor of Bathwick was purchased by William Pulteney, 1st Earl of Bath (1684-1764) from the Earl of Essex in 1727 along with Wrington Estate. Development of the estate was gradual until Henrietta Laura Pulteney, Countess of Bath (1766-1808), allowed an increasing number of building leases to be granted from 1782. Building expanded and by 1840 most of the Estate was completed, however construction continued around Bathwick Hill well into the 1970s. After the Countess's death the Estate passed to the first Duke of Cleveland, Harry William Vane (1766-1842), and ultimately to its final owner Captain Francis William Forester (1860-1942). Much of the estate was auctioned in 1919 and 1921, and in 1924 the Bathwick Estate Company was formed to manage the remaining properties, until it was liquidated in the early 1970s. Catalogued under refs 0036/, 0044/, 0055/ and 0103a/.

Rivers Estate, Manor of Walcot

Ellis Collection

Clifford Ellis (1907-1985) and Rosemary Collinson (1910-1998) first met in 1931, in the art department at Regent Street Polytechnic and married within a few years. They were based in Bath where Clifford taught design at the Technical School, becoming Head of Bath School of Art in 1936, which evolved into Bath Academy of Art, moving to Corsham Court in 1946. With Clifford Ellis as principal, it became one of the most innovative and vibrant art colleges in the country. Besides teaching, Clifford and Rosemary Ellis developed a very successful design partnership, working closely together on posters, book jackets and wallpaper designs, often featuring imagery from the natural world. A printed catalogue is available at ref 1177/. Their finished works are held at the Victoria Art Gallery.

Beresford Smith and Partners, Architects

This collection amalgamates the papers of several architects practicing in the City of Bath from 1826, including George Phillips Manners, J. Elkington Gill, Mowbray A. Green and F.W. Beresford Smith. The documents cover mainly 1820s to the 1980s and provide a valuable timeline of architectural styles, highlight local and social historical developments (such as repairing bomb damages and converting coach-houses to garages), while at the same time reflecting the wider national historical setting. As well as architectural plans and drawings, the collection includes a lot of the associated paperwork relating to an architect's business. Catalogued at ref 0529/.

Langton family papers

Theatre Royal Bath

The theatre in Orchard Street opened in 1750 and was the first theatre to gain a Royal licence outside London in 1768, becoming the Theatre Royal Bath. It moved to its present site in 1805. A major fire in 1862 resulted in a one-year rebuild and it has been refurbished many times since, most notably in 1909 as a requirement to have its Royal Patent reinstated. Records include the 1805 Tontine used to fund the new building, title deeds, other accounts, legal papers over ownership from the 19th century, season receipts 1838-1862. There is an extensive collection of playbills and programmes in this collection and elsewhere, including records of the Box-keeper and the acting Company from the 1770s. Catalogued under refs 0310/ and 0483/.

Bath Cricket Club

Co-operative Societies in the Bath Region

Partis College

Local History Society records

Parish Councils

Newspapers

Newspapers offer a unique look at everyday life in the past. Bath is lucky to have papers from the mid-eighteenth century onwards recording the highs and lows of social history.

The Bath Chronicle’s weekly edition is available through the British Newspaper Archive up to 1950, along with titles from the rest of the British Isles (this subscription site is available at the Record Office). The Georgian Newspaper Project indexed 17 years of the Bath Chronicle from 1770-1799 (1770-71; 1780; 1782-89; 1792-95; 1798-99).

Georgian Newspaper Project

For access to other titles, please use microfilm in the first instance wherever possible due to the fragile nature of the paper, which is easily damaged during handling. We do hold several more titles in hard copy only. Please contact us to request access to these papers as they are not held on site and may take up to 10 working days to retrieve from their stores. If you have the details of an article you would like a digital copy of, please see the details below.

Requesting copies

You can order copies of articles from any newspaper title we hold.

Articles from the Georgian Newspaper Project

Please include in your email or letter:

A copy of the text from the results page if possible (including the columns either side of the result itself).
If you can't include the copy, please include at least the date and page reference (e.g. 3c) of the article, as well as the subject, to enable us to locate the article in the original paper.

Copies from other newspapers

Please include in your email or letter:

The subject of the article - with as much detail as possible. Please note if a photograph is included.
The title of the newspaper with issue date (and page number if possible)
NB it may take up to two weeks to provide copies from other newspapers as most titles are not held at the Record Office itself.

Send your request by email to: [email protected]

Or by post (with your contact details) to:

Bath Record Office: Archives and Local Studies
Guildhall
High Street
Bath
BA1 5AW

Copies will be provided as digital images sent as an email attachment. Please note that it may take more than one image to copy long articles. The total will be confirmed with the customer to finalise the costs along with payment instructions. Payment can be made by cheque or online with a credit/debit card.

Costs of copies

£10.00 for up to 3 images
£3.00 per image thereafter
Multiple digital images can be supplied on CDRom - £1.50 within UK, £3.00 overseas.
Postage is included, but there may be an extra charge to cover bulk requests or overseas copies sent by post.

Images can be provided printed on A4 paper on request (there may be an additional charge for this service depending on quantity required).

A brief history of newspapers in Bath

Bath’s position as a fashionable Georgian resort led to a demand for newspapers with digests of the latest news from the London papers. The first newspaper, the Bath Journal, was published in 1744 followed by several more, resulting in three surviving titles by the end of the century: Bath Journal, Bath Chronicle, and Bath Herald. They contained little more than summaries of London news, a short section of Bath news, notices of Bristol shipping and lots of advertisements.

Producing newspapers was an expensive, risky business, and only one more title was started before 1850 – the Bath & Cheltenham Gazette. The reduction in reporting restrictions and dropping of stamp duties on paper mid-century opened up the market. In the following half century 10 new titles were started – including several daily editions of weekly papers, such as the Bath Chronicle’s daily edition.

Newspapers were originally published in small formats due to the limitations of hand-made paper. They ran to 4 or 5 columns per page and were usually of only 4 pages – i.e. 1 sheet folded in half to reduce paper stamp duty. After this tax on paper was lifted the newspapers expanded in page numbers, and the development of mass-produced wood-pulp paper increased the sheet sizes. Later Victorian papers are often densely printed with verbose reporting on large, broadsheet, pages.

Newspapers reached their heyday at the end of the 19th century and as a result of the rationing restrictions of WWI and competition from the radio, many titles folded or amalgamated. The last title standing was the Bath Chronicle following its incorporation of the Bath Herald in 1925. The Chronicle continued producing daily and weekly editions until 1980 when the three-month long journalists’ strike forced the closure of the weekly. The daily edition dropped to weekly production in September 2007 following pressure from online news reporting.

Books

The Archives hold most of their books and pamphlets within their own collection, ref PP/, which is currently being added to the catalogue. There are also books in many individual collections, notably the Royal Mineral Water Hospital collection, which includes several historic medical texts. The main Local Studies collections of books are:

Local Studies books

We hold about 20,000 books relating to Bath and the surrounding area, many of which are on open access in the searchrooms. The volumes in our stores are generally the more delicate items or ones only occasionally requested. We have early publications relating to the medical use of Bath waters, literature and histories. Accessible on the LibrariesWest catalogue https://www.librarieswest.org.uk/client/en_GB/default.

Rare Books

We hold around a thousand books of importance due to their rarity or age, mostly from the 17th and 18th centuries, and often with a local connection. We hold a unique copy of volume three of John Wood Sr’s An essay towards a description of Bath, and our pre-1500 incunabula include a copy of Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremburg Chronicle (1493). Several of the books have contemporary or near-contemporary bindings. There is a handlist of this collection and they are included in the card catalogue.

Bindings

We hold a small collection of volumes for their bindings, beyond those in the Rare Books collection. The core of this collection are about one hundred bindings by Alvah Cook, a lawyer by trade and amateur art bookbinder. We also hold examples from Chivers’ and Bayntun’s bookbinderies. A handlist of this collection exists, but this does not include binding descriptions as yet.

Bath Fiction

This collection, of nearly 600 volumes, is our largest thematic collection and contains novels and poetry written by persons connected to Bath and vicinity or written about the area. There are significant holdings of work by Sarah Grand, ‘Rita’ (Mrs Humphries) and Horace Annesley Vachell. Accessible on the LibrariesWest catalogue https://www.librarieswest.org.uk/client/en_GB/default

Special Presses

We have a small collection of modern handpress books that were often created with limited print runs. They include collections from the Golden Cockerel, Shakespeare’s Head, Kelmscott and Daniel Presses. Handlisted and catalogue cards only.

Music

Music was important in the social history of Bath, and this collection is mainly 18th and 19th century sheet music bound into volumes. It includes full scores of Handel and Haydn pieces, but is predominantly songs and chamber music. Printed catalogue of manuscript music, with detailed handlisting of contents underway.

Pamphlets

The majority of the Archives’ collection of pamphlets is within the PP/ series, currently being added to the Archives catalogue. There are also pamphlets distributed through collections such as Civil Defence and the Bath City Police. We have a collection of general reference pamphlets (not specific to local history) within Local Studies accessible on the LibrariesWest catalogue.

Local Studies pamphlets

There are approximately 10,000 publications relating to the local area that are too small or fragile to be kept on shelves. These include short monographs, offprints, extracts, flyers, supplements, reports, catalogues, brochures, guides and leaflets. Accessible on the LibrariesWest catalogue.

Bound Pamphlets

In the 18th and 19th century small publications, offprints and extracts were often collected together and bound to protect them. We have several collections of these ‘bound pamphlets’ – notably Boodle’s Somerset Pamphlets and collections by A W Page, M Oppenheim, and T S Cotterell. Some collectors bound them by subject, and we have books of collected trial reports and sermons. Partially accessible on the LibrariesWest catalogue, otherwise on catalogue cards only.

Early pamphlets

This covers two distinct collections: the Buxton Pamphlets and the pre-1801 pamphlets. The Buxton collection is of 16th to 19th century pamphlets that have never been bound and were collected by the same family until their donation to the Library in the 1950s. The pre-1801 pamphlets are general pamphlets of mainly local interest, including a run of Cheap Repository Tracts by Hannah More and her contemporaries. Both collections are accessible on the LibrariesWest catalogue.

Cards

Clippings

Posters and broadsides

Scrapbooks

A common habit amongst Victorian gentlemen, scrapbooks can be a valuable source of historical information that would be otherwise lost. There is a large selection of scrapbooks throughout the collections. Some are full of newspaper cuttings, and others include original artwork, letters and unique documents. There are some subject-specific scrapbooks, such as the Mayoralty scrapbooks; Sydenham (who was particularly interested in coins and tokens); Russell's maps collections; artists' workbooks and scrapbooks; and the Boodle scrapbooks have themes within the 36 volumes. The Hunt, Chapman and Russell scrapbooks are on Bath in Time and indexed in the Local Studies subject index cards, along with parts of the Boodle, Sydenham and Baker scrapbooks.

Theatre Royal Bath playbills

Trade cards and bills

Tickets

Books

On shelves around the searchrooms are many of the most heavily-used Local Studies books. They are shelved in Dewey order within their geographical regions: Bath, Local (B&NES outside Bath), Somerset, Gloucestershire & Bristol, and Wiltshire. Family history books include specialist subject titles and a long series of pamphlets by the Federation of Family History Societies. These are all listed on the LibrariesWest catalogue. See Books & Pamphlets for more information on the rest of the book collections.

There are also two periodicals on open access: Proceedings of the Somersetshire Archaeological and Natural History Society and the Somerset Record Society publications. There are more titles available in our strongrooms, please refer to the Periodicals leaflet.

Reference material

We have a number of standard reference books and other sources:

Directories: Bath street directories 1790s-1973 (earliest ones on request only), and Somerset, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Bristol. Full listing and details here.

Council Minutes: printed books of minutes, indexed by committee at the front (1895-1996). Additional years are available on request.

Electoral Registers: a selection of Bath City Borough registers 1832-2013. Years outside this range (including the most recent ones) and Bathforum/Wansdyke/NE Somerset Parliamentary District on request.

Periodicals: Clerical Lists (aka Crockford’s) 1841-present, Army List 1642-2005 and Navy Lists 1834-2012. A selection is available on open access on request and holdings not continuous. See Periodicals leaflet for full details of holdings.

Biographical: Various listings of artists, architects, medics, peers, and surname dictionaries are available alongside the family history books. Burke’s Peerage books on request. The Dictionary of National Biography, Who’s Who and other resources can be accessed online through the Library’s Online Resources page(link is external) with a membership card.

Victoria County Histories: Local counties are in the main searchroom, but there is a sequence of other counties on the shelves in the family history room. Listing on Periodicals leaflet.

Finding aids

There are many parts of the collections that cannot be found through our online catalogues but must be accessed through printed or written catalogues and indexes. These include:

Printed catalogues covering the Archives’ accessions, BC, BGB and Methodist sequences. Additionally, staff have access to older written handlists of collections.

Subject indexes for Archives (including people, places and PX photo series); Local Studies ephemera, autograph letters, manuscripts, and scrapbooks; and Local Studies maps and plans. There are also indexes for the Trade Cards and Clippings collections.

The large card catalogue in our entrance is mainly concerned with the library’s reference stock but includes many of Local Studies' ephemeral and pamphlet material not yet in the online catalogue. Most of the book stock is not held on site so please ask about access.

Maps and plans

Maps are wonderful resources for summarising a place at one point in time. The Record Office holds a wide variety of maps and plans to help with your research.

Our collection of maps mainly concentrates on the city of Bath and its growth from the 17th century onwards. Development and planning maps began appearing in the late 18th century and increased in frequency through the 19th century to the present day. There are plans relating to specific developments and major projects undertaken through the centuries.

General street maps, including several tourist maps, are frequently found in the collection. Although these mainly concentrate on the city, there are a number that include the surrounding country.

Ordnance Survey maps start appearing the early 19th century, becoming more detailed at larger scales from the last quarter of the century.

The term ‘Maps and Plans’ covers topographical maps (such as OS maps) and plans of specific outdoor spaces (such as cemeteries and estates). Architectural plans are dealt with in the Building History section.

We sell digitised copies of the Bath Blitz maps, the 1852 Cotterell town plans, the 1885 OS town plan maps, and the Ralph Allen estate plan – see our Shop page for details.

Local studies

The Bath in Time website acts as a finding aid for many of the Local Studies collections, including the loose prints, photographs, glass slides, and three major scrapbook collections (Hunt, Russell, Chapman).

Local Studies hold hundreds of glass slides, including: the Mowbray Green slides used in the preparation of his work on 18th century architecture; and the collection of George Love Dafnis, a turn of the 20th century amateur photographer who provided many familiar views of the area as they were published as postcards.

We also hold the image collections of the Bath Chronicle 1970-2007 that were donated when the newspaper moved their offices. The majority of this collection has not been digitised, although there are some subject areas covered on Bath in Time, such as the Bath Blitz and Royal Visits.

Explore Bath's world heritage

Other things to do in Bath

Our collections

Council records

At the core of our collections are the records of Bath City Council (later Bath & North East Somerset Council).

The Council records are complemented by the records of official bodies such as the law courts, the police, hospitals, schools and the Board of Guardians.

Hospitals

Police

Schools

Deposited collections

We hold many records which have been given to us by a wide range of societies, organisations, businesses, and individuals in the region. We refer to these as 'deposited records'.

Newspapers

Newspapers offer a unique look at everyday life in the past. Bath is lucky to have papers from the mid-eighteenth century onwards recording the highs and lows of social history.

Articles from the Georgian Newspaper Project

Copies from other newspapers

Costs of copies

The majority of the bound books and pamphlets in the Record Office are within the Local Studies collections. These are divided into collections as below.

Local Studies books

Rare Books

Bindings

Bath Fiction

Special Presses

Music

Local Studies pamphlets

Bound Pamphlets

Early pamphlets

Ephemeral items are inconsistent survivals from the historical printed record as they are, by definition, of a transitory nature.

We have several research sources available on open access in the public searchrooms that may help you with your enquiries.

Maps are wonderful resources for summarising a place at one point in time. The Record Office holds a wide variety of maps and plans to help with your research.

Within the Record Office collections there are images in many different formats: printed and negative photographs, glass slides, transparencies, engravings and lithographs, sketchbooks, scrapbooks and original artworks.

Explore Bath's world heritage

Explore Bath's world heritage

Other things to do in Bath

Our collections

Council records

At the core of our collections are the records of Bath City Council (later Bath & North East Somerset Council).

Discover more

Share this page

Follow us on social media

Stay updated