Explore Your Archive '25: Talk and Tour at the Historic England Archive

Come and find out more about our Archive here at The Engine House in Swindon as part of Explore Your Archive '25. Our tours are designed to introduce you to the Archive collections and include: a presentation about the history of the Archive, a chance to see inside our environment-controlled store and a visit to our Library and Public Search Room.

We are the Archive of England’s historic environment. We are located in The Engine House, which was built from the 1840s and was formerly the Great Western Railway’s Chief Mechanical Engineer’s Office and Drawing Office. We are a public archive of architectural and archaeological records and hold over 15 million historic photographs, plans, drawings, reports, records and publications, covering England’s archaeology, architecture, social and local history.

This tour is free to attend as part of the Explore Your Archive event.

The tour will involve some walking, including up and down some staircases, so please take that into consideration when booking. The Archive is also quite cold, so you will need to bring warm clothing with you.

Unfortunately, we do not have parking facilities for the general public, so we would encourage you to get to the site via other means or use the Swindon Outlet car park or Bristol Street Tunnel car park (however there is a charge for this).

We do have limited access to blue badge parking if needed. If you would like this, please contact Jade-India (Archive Engagement and Volunteering Officer) at amFkZS1pbmRpYSAhIGJhbG1lciB8IGhpc3RvcmljZW5nbGFuZCAhIG9yZyAhIHVr

If you have accessibility requirements and you would like to participate on the tour please do contact the above e-mail address in advance so that we can put the necessary measures in place.

Also check out other Arts events in Swindon, Fine Arts events in Swindon.