Tudor Joust

Choose your horse, select your armour, and ride into combat in the joust.

Start jousting!

Tudor Hackney virtual world

See inside the town of Hackney, as it was hundreds of years ago.

Visit Tudor Hackney

The Train

Use your brainpower to get to the seaside by steam train.

Test your knowledge

Victorian Crime

Patrol the streets as a 'peeler', catch the criminals and decide their punishment.

Start catching criminals!

Moving Here Multimart

Play a shopping game and win recipes for food from around the world.

Go to the Multimart

Codemaster

Send and receive coded messages with a real cipher used by French spies.

Send coded messages

Crime and punishment!

To play these games, follow the link and then click on the Game button.

Who decides the law? It's a Tug of War Go

Guilty? You be the judge Go

It's World War Two: How would you cope?

To play these games, follow the link and then click on the Activity button.

Bomb Shelter Go

Shopping in war-time Go

Escape from the Blitz Go

The National Archives takes care of the records of government and the courts of law for England, Wales and the UK. We keep records that are of value to history and should be saved forever. That means that we have documents that are nearly 1000 years old, as well as recent MI6 files that are still top secret.

Our collection is one of the largest in the world. There are over 100 miles of archives at our main building in Kew, growing at the rate of one mile a year. We store extra documents down an old salt mine in Cheshire. The mine has the perfect climate for preserving records, insects that eat paper can't live down there, and any intruders would quickly get lost.

There are many kinds of records. We have photos, letters, medieval parchments, films, posters, seals used by kings and queens, logbooks of famous explorers, designs for new inventions, and records of crimes. We have more than 6 million maps, including the biggest map in the country.

We keep the collections safe so that everyone can look at them. Students of all ages come to the archives to learn more about what happened in the past. Writers come to research their books and TV presenters come to film history programmes. You are welcome to visit us too.