Access and Enquiries
The Archive is open for research by appointment at Threadneedle Street, London, EC2R 8AH.
Please contact us with questions, to book an appointment, to learn more about our collections, or to share feedback on our services.
Contact us:
Bank of England Archive, Threadneedle Street, London, EC2R 8AH
Some digital material is not suitable for online publication but can be accessed by visiting the Bank Archive. When you search the Archive catalogue a link will be provided where a digital item is available. This link will indicate whether the material is available online or via visiting the Bank Archive.
In common with many other Archives, a number of records have not yet been released for research because they are very recent or for reasons of sensitivity or confidentiality. For more information please click on the following link: When are records made available to the public.
Digital Records
For some digital records the date of the original item is unknown. Where a date has been provided by the Archive with a degree of uncertainty, the date is presented as, for example, c. 1995.
Assumed dates are presented in square brackets, for example [2001].
Please note that digital records can be very large files and may take time to load.
Where a record can be downloaded this function has been made available.
Searching the Digital Archive
You can “browse” the digital archive content or perform a simple “search” using key words if you are looking for something specific (see search box top right of this webpage).
You can search paper and digital records through the Archive catalogue and the results will link you to the catalogue entry of the physical or digital content we have available. Where a digital record exists a link will be provided to this material in the digital archive.
You can also search the digital archive through the search function of this website. The search function of the digital archive website WILL search the CONTENT of records which are in the format of a PDF, Word, or Excel document. The digital archive search WILL NOT search the content of images of digitized materials.
Please note that when you conduct a search of the Archive catalogue you are not searching the text within the records, you are searching the metadata (the data about the records that has been recorded in the catalogue).
When using the digital archive search box put your search term in double quotation marks to generate more accurate results e.g. a search for “Monetary Policy Committee” will search for these words together within a record.
Results are returned for exact matches only, for instance a search for “movie” will not return results for “film”.
You can wildcard search in any part of a search word to widen your search. Use an asterisk (*) at the beginning or end of a word, or within a word, to return records which include variants of the search word, for example:
- A search for ‘bank*’ will return records that include the words banks and banking
- A search for ‘hum*rey’ will return records that include the names Humphrey and Humfrey
- A search for ‘*ward’ will return records that include the words inward and outward
The search function allows a search technique called Boolean searching. This allows you to combine search terms using “and, or, not” searching options:
- + represents Boolean And, meaning the search result must include this word
- − represents Boolean Not, meaning the search result must exclude this word
- | represents Boolean Or, meaning the search result may include this word
