The only requirements to access documents in our Reading Room are to be aged 16 or over, and to agree to our rules.

The only requirements to use our remote reprographics service are agreeing to the copyright terms in our request form.

Where possible, we have published material in our holdings that is out of copyright to be freely available online, such as on our access portal.

If you know that we hold material that you are interested in, and are happy using archives, then you can book a place in our Reading Room or submit a reprographics request.

Otherwise, you can browse our catalogue to see what material we have, or drop us an email at [email protected], and we should be able to help you find out if we have anything that may be useful to you and get you started. If you are interested in a particular topic, or if it’s a particular person you are searching for, we can give you some tips on searching our online catalogues.

We have over 600 archive collections, broadly (but not exclusively) from the 20th century to the present; not just the Churchill Papers. There is a summary of all our collections in our Guide to Holdings with links to the online catalogue to each collection, which can be filtered by subject. Our particular strengths are:

• Politics and public life
• International relations
• Science, science policy and debate
• Social science, policy and observation
• Journalism and the media

Mostly, yes, as the majority of our catalogues are online, either via ArchivesSearch, which we share with other archives in Cambridge. In some cases though, if it hasn’t been fully catalogued, or we only have an old paper catalogue which hasn’t been converted to an online format yet, there may only be a summary of the collection online. If this is the case with the collection you want to see, let us know, and we should be able to send you the information we have another way.

We encourage you to pre-order files before your visit so that we can have them ready for your arrival, however this is not strictly necessary, and you can order more items throughout the day, outside of our lunch break 12:30 – 13:30 and before last productions at 16:00. Please see our Visit Us page for more information.

The Churchill Papers have been published on a subscription site by Bloomsbury at churchillarchive.com, but this site can be freely used at the Archives Centre, at Churchill College and at other subscribing institutions. Researchers can directly download images of documents and so are encouraged to consider bringing a laptop or other device for this purpose. For conservation reasons, the fragile originals are no longer issued to researchers. See the Churchill Papers page for more information.

If you are not able to visit us in Cambridge there are a number of ways you can get remote access to churchillarchive.com. Please feel free to contact Churchill Archives Centre for guidance at [email protected]. If you are affiliated to an institution of higher education, please check with your librarian to see if the institution has a subscription or is running a trial. There is also free access to the Churchill Papers for schools, at churchillarchiveforschools.com.

Unfortunately we have very little film of Churchill; there is a short film of him planting a tree to mark the foundation of Churchill College in 1959, along with footage of him on holiday in the Netherlands and Marrakech in the same year in the Churchill Additional Papers at WCHL 6/21 and there is some amateur and professional film of Churchill’s funeral at WCHL 5, but that is about it. We do however have recordings of many of his speeches (though as these are mostly on the original gramophone records, not all of them can be easily accessed). See WCHL 3 and WCHL 12 for more information.

Many of the records we hold are very modern and Data Protection restrictions may apply if they contain sensitive information on living people. There are also some closures relating to exemptions specified in the Freedom of Information Act, 2000, for instance in records relating to intelligence or national security. For more information see our Freedom of Information policy.

Certain records may be also unavailable until fully catalogued and the Centre’s staff should be able to explain any restrictions in place. Some archives which are too fragile to be safely handled may not be available, and in certain cases, a surrogate may be produced in place of the original.

When including a reference to our collections in a footnote or bibliography, you should always follow the referencing style guidance set by your faculty, journal, or publisher. As a minimum we ask that you include the name of the repository (Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge), the name of the collection (e.g. ‘The Papers of Julian Amery’, ‘The Papers of Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee’, ‘The Papers of Field Marshal Lord Slim’), and the alpha-numerical document reference as provided by our catalogue (e.g. ‘MTNR 5/6’ or ‘RTBT 5/2/1, file 4’).

Get in touch at [email protected] and we can supply you with a publication licence and advice on clearing copyright.