You’ll find British and overseas newspapers dating back to the 1600s and we have growing collections of radio, television and web news

Collection guides

  • A bound printed newspaper

    Newspapers

    We have over 60 million newspapers from the early 17th century to the present day
  • Image from the British Newspaper Archive

    British Newspaper Archive

    Over 40 million searchable pages, from more than 1,000 newspaper titles from UK and Ireland
  • Clive Myrie presenting BBC News

    Television and radio news

    The Broadcast News service provides onsite access to recent news programmes
  • Display of part of a web page

    Web news

    Our Legal Deposit UK Web Archive includes millions of websites from the UK domain
  • Still image of newspaper data interactive resource

    News data

    The News Data collection comprises a range of downloadable, shareable, reusable datasets derived from metadata created from the British Library’s news collections.
  • Image from the Burney Collection

    Burney collection

    Largest single collection of 17th and 18th-century English newspapers available

Help

Readers at desks in the Newsroom at the British Library

Newsroom

A dedicated space for newspapers, broadcast and web news.

  • Find information on the open-access shelves
  • Access microfilm, print and digital newspapers
  • Order collection items to the Reading Rooms via our catalogues

If you need help, please ask our Reference Specialists at the enquiry desk or contact the News Reference Service Team.

We offer a range of free Reader sessions and 1-2-1 consultations to help you make the best use of the Library's collections.

You’ll need a Reader Pass

Mon 10.00 – 20.00
Tue – Thu 09.30 – 20.00
Fri – Sat 09.30 – 17.00
Sun & English Public Holidays closed

Opening hours for all Reading Rooms

News stories

Listen to our latest news media podcast

23 July 2015

In our latest news media podcast Linda Stratmann discusses murder, mayhem and escaped elephants in the Illustrated Police News

National Newspaper Building open

23 July 2015

New long-term home for UK national newspaper collection now holds 60 million newspapers in low oxygen storage

Blog posts from the Newsroom

200 years of collecting newspapers

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

2022 marks a special anniversary for the Newspaper Collection at the British Library. 200 years ago, in April 1822, the British Museum’s Department of Printed Books began systematically collecting newspapers. From that foundation the Library’s newspaper collections has continued to...

British Library Television News Programme-Level List

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Following on from our recent announcement of a complete title-level downloadable listing of all newspapers catalogued by the British Library, we now have a downloadable listing of all our television news programmes, available from today on our Research Repository. British...

World newspaper data from the British Library

Sunday, June 12, 2022

The British Library has 36,253 newspaper titles from 193 countries and territories, representing 88 languages. How do we know this? Because we’ve been analysing the data. Now we’re making that data freely available for anyone to view, download, edit and...

Creating infographics for historical news

Tuesday, June 7, 2022

The British Library is currently hosting at its St Pancras site a free exhibition of infographics on Victorian news topics, created using data from digitised newspapers and other sources. In this guest post, one of the professional designers behind the...

More blog posts

News media projects

Bound volumes of newspapers at the British Library Newspaper Library Colindale North London

Newspaper moves

The Newspaper Moves Programme safeguards the long-term future of the national newspaper collection

All projects

Case studies

More Case studies
Portrait of Ruth Byrne
…A collaborative PhD with the British Library gives me the means to access a public audience…

Ruth uses the digitised newspaper collection to explore attitudes towards immigration in nineteenth century Britain.

Mary Kay Culpepper
…“I have come to think of the British Library as a gym for writers.”…

Using the Newsroom for PhD research and writing

Alex Hall, PhD researcher using the British Library's newspapr collection
…...it's good for finding those little pieces of the jigsaw...…

Using newspapers in research: Alex Hall, PhD student

External links

The British Library is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Newspaper Licensing Agency

The collecting society for UK newspapers

List of Newspapers

Directory of online newspapers worldwide

News Media Association

Represents and promotes the interests of Britain's regional and local media

British Newspaper Archive

Digitised newspapers from the British Library

Europeana Newspapers

Three-year project (2012-15) to aggregate 18 million historic newspaper pages

Shop

Front cover of Comic, Curious and Quirky News Stories from Centuries Past

Comic, Curious and Quirky News Stories from Centuries Past

Humorous, bizarre and quirky newspaper stories spanning the 1700s to 1900s.

£10

Try it! buy it!

Try It! Buy It!

A colourful collection of more than 200 classic advertisements, drawn from the British Library's collection.

£12.99

Image from the Propaganda exhibition book

Propaganda: Power and Persuasion

Explore the range of propaganda used by different states – and their opponents.

£19.99