Bath & North East Somerset Council

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Bath Record Office will be closed from Thursday 19 March until further notice, in line with the latest advice from Public Health England. Keep following us for updates and we look forward to welcoming you back soon. Please read here for more information.

Photograph of old leather-bound volumes Photograph of old leather-bound volumes Show image info

Eighteenth-century Bath City Council minutes

Online catalogues

Catalogues to about half the collections we hold are available online on different websites.

South West Heritage Trust website

Catalogues to just under half the Archive's collections can be found in a joint catalogue which includes archives held in the Bath Record Office and in the Somerset Archives and Local Studies. To search these catalogues use this link to the South West Heritage Trust website.

National Archives website

A small number of catalogues are available on the National Archives' 'Discovery' website (which now incorporates the former Access to Archives (A2A) website and the National Register of Archives). The website includes catalogues from a large number of record offices in England and Wales. To look only for archives held by the Bath Record Office, use the Advanced Search option, which will enable you to choose 'Bath Record Office : Archives' under 'Other Archives' in the 'Held By' section at the bottom of the form. The Local Studies collections are seperately listed under Bath Record Office : Local Studies.

Local Studies Collection

The majority of the printed books and pamphlets in the Local Studies collection are listed on the Libraries West catalogue - items located at the Guildhall are listed at B&NES Local Studies and Archives. Items held at the BNES Reserve Store are not available onsite but can be retrieved by special request. Bath in Time acts as the catalogue for the majority of the image collection and some maps and plans.

Catalogues not available online

About half of the material we hold are not listed on any of these online catalogues. If you can't find what you are looking for online, do please contact us to see whether we hold records relevant to your research. The old Library card catalogue is now housed in the Bath Record Office although please note that we no longer hold many of the items listed on these cards and almost all the printed items are held in the Reserve Store offsite. There are several handlists and other finding aids available for sections of the collections at the Record Office.

The records of Bath City Council/Bath & North East Somerset Council have been partially catalogued with the help of funding from the National Cataloguing Grants Programme for Archives.  You can see the catalogue here, as a PDF.