Parliamentary Archives
In addition to the class of Original Acts already mentioned, the clerks preserved Journals of the House of Lords, now surviving from 1510, Petitions from 1531 and Bills from 1558.
It seems, however, that the office was somewhat haphazard in its methods; Cardinal Wolsey, for instance, when Lord Chancellor, is said to have removed all the Acts and Journals relating to one session.
Petitions and many other forms of Papers coming to the Lords were carefully filed; extensive series of rough Minutes and of Committee Proceedings were preserved; and, not least in importance, the records were assigned a permanent home at the south west corner of the Palace of Westminster, in a moated building (still surviving, and open to the public), the 14th-century Jewel Tower.
This was in part due to the isolated position of the Jewel Tower, where the main series of records had been preserved, but also in part owing to the efforts of a Lords clerk, Henry Stone Smith, who threw out of the blazing windows of the main building onto Old Palace Yard many hundreds of bundles of other Lords papers that had not been transferred to the Jewel Tower.
These bundles for several decades after the fire led a confused existence, being virtually forgotten by those outside the Parliament Office, until, in 1870, the newly formed Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts began to issue regular reports.
The first Report of the Commission brought to light a packet of letters which had been abandoned by Charles I at the Battle of Naseby, as well as the "annexed" Book of Common Prayer of 1662, the Declaration of Breda, and other public muniments which had "just been untombed from this mausoleum of historic remains" (as Thomas Duffus Hardy and his fellow Commissioners remarked).
Charles Barry's winning design had as its culminating feature a tower over the Royal entrance in which every storey included "Record Rooms".
The resulting report by V. M. R. Goodman revealed the necessity of a full-time staff (which the records did not then have) to undertake boxing, repair and production of the manuscripts.
A public Search Room was opened, and when in the 1950s the Record Office Technical Committee highlighted the need for repairing the thousands of deposited plans in the Victoria Tower, two craftsmen were recruited specifically for this task.
It was declared open by the Viscount Hailsham, Leader of the House of Lords, on 3 July 1963, with the intention, as he said, that "this new building may have a long and distinguished career... in the service of Parliament, history, and culture".
From 2000 to 2004 the air-conditioning and other environmental controls in the Victoria Tower were refurbished to bring it up to the British Standard for archival storage, BS 5454, and from 2000 to 2005 a major project converted the paper finding aids of the collections into a single on-line catalogue, known as Portcullis.
[4] The team provide information management, preservation, access and outreach services enabling anyone in the world to use Parliament’s records, both now and in the future.
[1] The reasons for the move include challenging environmental conditions of Victoria Tower and increased need for public access to the collections.
