19th century The
Record Commissions were a series of six
royal commissions of
Great Britain and (from 1801) the
United Kingdom which sat between 1800 and 1837 to inquire into the custody and public accessibility of the state
archives. The commissions emphasised the poor conditions and variety of places in which records were held. As a result, the '''''' (
1 & 2 Vict. c. 94) was passed to "keep safely the public records". The act established the Public Record Office, a non-ministerial department under the keepership of the
Master of the Rolls, a senior judge whose job originally had included responsibility for keeping the records of the
Court of Chancery, who appointed a Deputy Keeper as Chief Record Keeper. Some of the records were court or departmental archives (established for several centuries) which were well-run and had good or adequate catalogues; others were little more than store-rooms. Many of the professional staff of these individual archives simply continued their existing work in the new institution. Many documents were transferred from the
Tower of London and the
Chapter House of
Westminster Abbey, though
Domesday Book was not moved from Westminster Abbey until 1859, when proper storage had been prepared. Until 1852 no right existed for the general public to consult the records freely, even for scholarly purposes, despite the intention of the
Public Record Office Act 1838 to enable public access. Fees were payable by lawyers who in return were permitted to consult a limited number of documents. These charges were abolished for serious historical and literary researchers after a petition was signed in 1851 by 83 people including
Charles Dickens and the historians
Lord Macaulay and
Thomas Carlyle. Between 1851 and 1858 a purpose-built archive repository was built next to the Rolls Chapel, to the design of the
architect Sir James Pennethorne, and following the chapel's demolition due to structural unsoundness, was extended onto that original site between 1895 and 1900.
20th century The growing size of the archives held by the PRO and by government departments led to the
Public Records Act 1958, which sought to avoid the indiscriminate retention of huge numbers of documents by establishing standard selection procedures for the identification of those documents of sufficient historical importance to be kept by the PRO. Even so, growing interest in the records produced a need for the Office to expand, and in 1977 a second building was opened at
Kew in south-west London. The Kew building was expanded in the 1990s and by 1997 all records had been transferred from Chancery Lane either to Kew or to the
Family Records Centre in
Islington, North London. The Chancery Lane building was acquired by
King's College London in 2001, and is now the
Maughan Library, the university's largest library.
Merger with the Historical Manuscripts Commission In April 2003 the PRO merged with the
Historical Manuscripts Commission (HMC) to form
The National Archives. The HMC moved from its previous office, also located off Chancery Lane, to Kew in 2004. The
National Archives of Scotland and the
Public Record Office of Northern Ireland were and remain separate institutions. ==Functions==