Free online resources
Ancestry Library Edition
Researching your family tree? If you are a Tower Hamlets Idea Store user, you can access our subscription to Ancestry Library Edition for free. Available on any Tower Hamlets library or idea store PC with no login requirement by going directly to the Ancestry Library Edition homepage.
Ancestry is the world’s largest online database of family history records, including birth, marriage, death and census records. It is good for anyone tracing London ancestors. Some useful digitised record sets include:
- Tower Hamlets Cemetery Registers, 1841-1966
- London Selected Church of England Parish Registers, 1558-1875
- London Electoral Registers, 1832-1972
- London City Directories, 1736-1943
This service is only available at Tower Hamlets idea stores and libraries.
The British Newspaper Archive
Discover history as it happened with access to hundreds of historic newspapers from all over Britain and Ireland dating from 1700 onwards with our subscription to the British Newspaper Archive. Their collections feature several East London newspapers, including:
- The East End news and advertiser (1869-1899)
- The Eastern post (1868-1938)
- East London observer (1857-1928, with plans to continue adding issues up to 1944)
- Tower Hamlets independent and East End local advertiser (1866-1912)
- Woman's dreadnought (1914-1924, known as the Workers' dreadnought from 1917)
See our user guide to newspapers and periodicals for a full list of East End titles.
This service is only available at Tower Hamlets idea stores and libraries.
You will need to register for a free account and then log in to the British Newspaper Archive with that account in a Tower Hamlets idea store or library to get unlimited access.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Access 50,000 biographies of people who shaped history via the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
This service is available to Tower Hamlets Idea Store members only. You are required to add an additional 'TH' prefix to your library card login.
BFI Replay
Relive, research, and lose yourself in the past with thousands of digitised videos and television programmes from the 1960s to the 2010s, including unique material from our moving image collections.
BFI Replay is brought to you by the British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive and partner regional archives across the UK.
This service is only available at Tower Hamlets idea stores and libraries on our public PCs.
Archive Film and Video
Explore hours of rare archive footage of Tower Hamlets on our YouTube channel, which features a selection of films and videos from our collection.
Highlights include:
- Amateur footage of Tower Hamlets Carnival from 1979
- A fly-on-the-wall documentary from 1985 showing a day in the life at Stepping Stones Farm
- Three episodes of Dogs Life, a video magazine produced for Isle of Dogs residents in the mid-1980s
We have also created a playlist, The East End on Film, which brings together the best archive footage of London’s East End from other YouTube channels.
These films were digitised by Film London, who have also made these videos available to watch via the London’s Screen Archive website.
Image Library
Visit our digital Image Library to browse some of our 36,000 photographs reflecting life in Tower Hamlets over the centuries, including a large number of historic street scenes.
More images of Tower Hamlets can be found online at The London Archives’ London Picture Archive website.
Maps
Tower Hamlets Local History and Archives holds over 2,000 maps, a small sample of which Layers of London have digitised and made available online, including:
- Joel Gascoyne's 1703 parish maps of Bethnal Green, Limehouse and Mile End Old Town, and Stepney
- Plans of the East and West India Docks, 1886
- A map of the Metropolitan Borough of Stepney showing the locations of World War II air raid shelters
Read our maps user guide for links to more free online map resources.
Paintings Collection
We hold a large collection of paintings featuring places in Tower Hamlets or by East End artists including Doreen Fletcher, Noël Gibson, and Rose Henriques.
ArtUK have digitised a selection of these artworks and made them available to view online.
Archives Online
Explore a selection of digitised items from our collections. Selected to be of particular interest to family historians, they include apprentice registers, taxation records and registers from places of worship.
They include many names and other personal details, and all records have an alphabetical index.
Oral History
Explore clips from our extensive oral history collection to hear borough residents in their own words. Listen to former East End shop owners, Bengali community organizers and anti-racist protesters, Somali migrants and many more describe their experiences of Tower Hamlets.
Local History Walks
Are you a borough resident or planning a visit to Tower Hamlets? Why not download our local history walks and explore the history of our borough and communities on foot.
Online Exhibitions
We have a selection of online exhibitions for you to explore, including: