Barts Health Archives
The archives and objects cared for by Barts Health are amongst the largest and most important hospital and healthcare collections in the UK, spanning over 2.5km of shelving and nine centuries of history.
Welcome to our archives
Welcome to our archives
Our collections span from 1137 to the present day, and includes records relating to staff, patients, buildings and management of the hospitals in the current Barts Health group, as well as numerous other hospitals, institutions, charities, organisations and individuals relating to health care and training in the City and East London.
Most records are available for research, with some exceptions under the Data Protection Act.
Please check our ‘Visiting the archives’ section below before booking a visit.
Our Twitter feed also has our latest information.
Support our work by donating or joining our newsletter for updates.
Visiting the archives
Visiting the archives
Before your visit
Search our online catalogue beforehand to identify relevant material.
Appointments are required, and should be booked at least a week in advance. Please notify us if you will be accompanied by someone acting in a support or carer role or have additional access requirements.
We are open Tuesday to Friday, 9:30am to 4pm, with a lunch closure from 12:30pm to 1pm. The archives will be closed over the Christmas period from Monday 23 December 2024 to Wednesday 1 January 2025 inclusive. We will then be closed for our annual Collections Fortnight closure from Monday 6 January-Friday 27 January 2025 inclusive, to focus on audit and large scale processing projects.
Order documents when booking your appointment, by 12:30pm on Friday for consultation the following week.
All visitors must complete a researcher registration form in advance, agreeing to our access regulations [pdf] . Please contact us to make an appointment.
Once your appointment has been arranged
The search room at St Bartholomew’s Hospital is accessible through Kenton and Lucas entrance C on the ground floor.
On arrival, please ring the archives doorbell (opposite the door at entrance C).
Please call us on 020 3465 7608 or email us if you are running late.
Please refrain from visiting if you have any symptoms of infectious illnesses.
Searching the archives
Searching the archives
To find out more about our archives, search or browse our online catalogue. We can help and advise researchers, so please contact us with your enquiry. We also have a suite of research guides, designed to highlight some of the key research themes across our collections and to tell you where you can find, access and understand the relevant records. This is an expanding resource and we will be adding more guides over time.
We aim to be as helpful as possible, but we do not have the staff resources to carry out detailed research for you.
What we hold
We hold records of over 35 current and former hospitals as well as many organisations, institutions and individuals associated with the hospitals and with health care and health education in London - over 100 individual collections. You can find a full list of archive collections, with links through to the online catalogue, here.
View the locations of the hospitals for which we hold records and click through to our catalogue using the map below:
We are continually adding new material to the catalogue, and undertaking conservation work to ensure that the archives can be accessed now and in the future.
In recent years, generous funding from the Wellcome Trust, The Medical College of St Bartholomew’s Hospital Trust, and Barts Charity has enabled us to add thousands more items to our online catalogue. Read more about previous projects The Fight Against Tuberculosis, STIs in East London in the Twentieth Century, and A Study in Specialism on the project blogs, and find out more about the history of Whipps Cross Hospital captured through the Whipps Cross Voices project through the project website.
Accessing archives and archival datasets online
You can search catalogue descriptions of over 70,000 records online, using our online catalogue. Although the majority of the records listed on the catalogue can currently only be consulted through a visit to the archives, afew collections or series of records have been digitised and can be accessed online, as follows:
- Images from the St Bartholomew's Hospital Pathology Illustrations collection are available as part of the Wellcome Collection's image catalogue.
- Search the Student Registers for St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College, 1906-1934 and indexes to earlier students
- Search the St Bartholomew's Hospital Journal from 1893 onwards
- Search the Dissection Registers of St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College.
A few films from our audio visual collections have been digitised and may be viewed at our YouTube channel, alongside short videos produced by the archives team to highlight items and stories from the collections.
The Historic Hospital Admission Records Project (HHARP) is an online database of admission records for four historic children's hospitals, including the Alexandra Hospital for Children with Hip Disease, records of which are held in our collections. The database of admissions for the Alexandra Hospital covers inpatient admissions for the years 1867-1895 The website also features articles on aspects of the hospital’s history, and short biographies of medical staff. Registration is necessary to access the full contents, but is free of charge.
Records of many other London hospitals whose records are not held by Barts Health Archives are held at London Metropolitan Archives. Their guide to the Hospital Records they hold, and how to access them, is available online.
Useful websites
Supporting our work
Anyone can access our historic collections, from family and local history researchers to current clinicians and academic historians, as well as groups from education and the local community, in our searchroom on the St Bartholomew's Hospital site.
Our collections span the 12th to the 21st centuries. The archives range from medieval deeds on parchment to large leather-bound ledgers, microfilms and rolled plans, and we hold objects including medical equipment, sculpture, paintings, textiles and more. Although we house collections in specialist acid-free packaging in environmentally-controlled stores, and supervise good practice in handling the collections, many of the archives and objects in the collection have suffered damage during their lives. Some of the collections were subjected to London pollution, open coal fires and hospital chemicals, as well as storage in attics and basements before transfer to archives. Many items are now in urgent need of specialist conservation or rebinding, and a few cannot be accessed by researchers due to their unstable condition.
It is vital that these items are preserved for current researchers and for future generations to access, learn from, and enjoy. You can help us preserve our unique collections by donating to help us fund conservation work. Our donations are managed through the Archives Fund held with Barts Charity (SPF2501); you can donate online to the Archives Fund.
We are very grateful for any support you can provide, no matter how small. Examples of the sort of work your donations will be put to are outlined below.
£100 : This amount could pay for up to 25 custom made, archival enclosures to protect fragile collections, or 15 strong acid-free boxes to house collections in the stores.
£500: This amount could support the treatment by an archive conservator of deteriorating leather bindings of one of the thousands of registers and volumes of administrative records in our collections to stabilise the degradation process and prevent further damage. It could pay for the disbinding and rehousing of early case notes with inadequate and broken bindings.
£1000: This amount could pay for more extensive bespoke work, such as conserving a damaged rolled plan and housing it in a specially-made enclosure, to make it accessible for research for the future.
All supporters making donations over £50 will receive a pack of postcards featuring images from the collections.
If you would like to make a gift via bank transfer with no administrative fees, or discuss how to leave a legacy to support the care of the collections, please contact the archives directly. Thank you for your support.
Educational resources and learning opportunities
Downloadable KS2 learning resources
Our KS2 learning resources, based on the history of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and some of the fascinating items from the hospital's collections, are FREE to download. The resource pack is designed to introduce children to the story of the hospital’s nine century history of healthcare – it is not necessary to visit the archives to use it. The pack supports cross-curricular learning, linking to English, Maths, Science and PSHE as well as History.
The resources consist of a Discovery sheet, highlighting facts and themes from the hospital’s story, and three Activity sheets. There is also an answer sheet providing sample answers to the Activity questions. The resources can be used in the classroom or for home-based learning. We would like to thank the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths for their generous support for the development of the resource pack.
Please use the links below to download the pack:
Nine centuries of healthcare - Discovery Sheet 1MB
Nine centuries of healthcare - Activity Sheet 1 648KB
Nine centuries of healthcare - Activity Sheet 2 743KB
Reprographics and publications for sale
We can provide copies of many documents through our paid reprographics service. To order copies for your own private research purposes or to obtain permission to reproduce anything from the collections, please contact us, giving details of the document, including the reference number (listed as ‘RefNo’ in the catalogue description). Please see our reprographics and publication charges for information [pdf]
We sell a small range of books and postcards - please see our list of Publications and postcards for sale 2024-25 [pdf] for details. To order any of these items, please email us .
Newsletters and Blogs from the Archives
We regularly publish blog posts focusing on items and stories from the collections, as well as current projects and insights into the work done by the archives team. Read Blogs from the Archives here.
In 2023, we launched the Barts Health NHS Trust Archives newsletter, to share updates on recent activities and current projects. Contact us to join our mailing list. You can also download previous issues here:
Barts Health NHS Trust Archives Newsletter, Number 1, March 2023
Barts Health NHS Trust Archives Newsletter, Number 2: June 2023
Barts Health NHS Trust Archives Newsletter, Number 3: September 2023
Barts Health NHS Trust Archives Newsletter, Number 4: December 2023
Barts Health NHS Trust Archives Newsletter, Number 5: March 2024
Barts Health NHS Trust Archives Newsletter, Number 6: June 2024
Barts Health NHS Trust Archives Newsletter, Number 7: September 2024
Our service and collections policies
We produce detailed policies on key aspects of the Barts Health NHS Trust Archives service, outlining how we collect and care for the material in our collections, and how we provide public access to those collections.
For more information about what we collect, please refer to our Collections Development policy below. Please contact us before sending any records or objects you wish to donate to our collections. Unsolicited donations sent without contact details of the donor may be disposed of.
All policies are dated and may be revised as appropriate. These policies are reviewed at least every three years to keep them up to date. We will endeavour to have the most up-to-date versions available on this page. If you cannot find a matter of policy addressed in the documents available here below, please contact us for further information.
· Collections Access policy [pdf]
St Bartholomew's Hospital Museum
St Bartholomew's Hospital Museum tells the story of nine centuries of healthcare at the edge of the City of London.
Please note, the Museum is currently closed for the duration of building works to the North Wing, for the safety and security of visitors and collections.
Works to the historic North Wing are taking place as part of the part of the Restoring Historic Barts project led by Barts Heritage. Objects and records from our collections, including those formerly on display, are accessible for research at Barts Health NHS Trust Archives. You can search our catalogue online to identify objects of interest and contact us to make an appointment. Find out more about booking appointments here.
We hope to reopen the museum to visitors in 2025. Works to update and improve the museum are expected to take place in the second phase of works, following completion of the most essential restoration works to the exterior and the main public spaces of the building during this first phase of the project. For more information about the Restoring and Sharing Historic Barts programmes, please see the Barts Heritage website.
Please note, St Bartholomew's Hospital Museum does not hold specimens. Barts Pathology Museum, also on the hospital site, is part of Barts and The London Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, and is not normally open to the public.
The Archives blog
Barts Health NHS Trust Archives does what it says on the tin! As our name suggests, we hold the records and historic collections of the current Trust hospitals. But our collections span a much wi…
The Trust Archives has recently updated our webpage with information about how you can support the work we do to preserve and conserve our collections (check out the 'Supporting our work' section…
For a business which was only existence for just over 50 years the London Hospital Ligature Department had a remarkable impact on suturing as well as medical marketing. The London Hospital Ligature…
Through our current project, 'Bringing the Collections Closer at the Royal London Hospital', we are working with patients and local residents who are joining us as Community Curators to select items f…
