Do you feel safe, child? No? Time for you to meet PC Payphone who will set your mind at ease.

The only thing more exciting than seeing some of our documents: a big ol' carnyx

We're big fans of Bernard Cornwell novels here in the archive, including Sharpe's Triumph, Sharpe's Eagle, and of course,

There aren't many jobs in the archive sector, but there are a lot of people studying to become archivists. This has led to the development of the combination Archivist/Ronin, a wandering historian bound to no daimyo or record office

Archival documents? Yeah dude, that's the idea.

We've found this great mid 19th century card of the MP John Bright, here depicted as 'The Birmingham Bruiser', advocating for parliamentary reform. Can you spot some familiar faces in the crowd?

Why is Aylesbury the county town?

It's both Easter Monday and #MKMonday! Here's a lovely 1978 poster for a Children's Easter School. Disappointingly it features horse riding, arguably the only sport on the poster that couldn’t involve an egg.

Happy Easter from all of us here at Buckinghamshire Archives!

Some relationship advice from this early 20th century postcard: Don't keep telling her about how much you love tomatoes dude she's clearly over it.

Some bad news from your favourite archive

While we're hard at work planning out our events for Heritage Open Days, we thought we'd share a blog post we wrote for them a little while ago! In it we discuss some of the weirder items we've found in our collection, including bullets, dog bitten documents, and bizarre photos from Milton Keynes.

You've got to be careful with using AI in research. For example, Google's AI incorrectly says that Calais isn't rightfully British.

It's #MKMonday, so here's a lovely aerial view of the 1994 FutureWorld exhibition! This open air exhibition highlighted new trends in architecture, and it was eventually integrated into the rest of Milton Keynes once the exhibition concluded.

Archives were invented in 1838 by John Archive when he put down a book and wrote down where it was

wow turns out he was right, our apologies

We were going to criticise Jefery Heart's sketch of some chickens here but for all we know 18th century chickens just looked like that.

just planning out some more content for the fans

Yeah we've heard about Sora. Sora great document in our collection, open for visitors today from 9am to 5pm.

This morning we need some palaeography help! We're working on this document from 1790 and we're stuck on the word in the middle of the image. '...Parish of Chalfont, [Unknown], declare...' Any ideas?

Get absolutely reptile mogged. Mammals too jealous of this drip.

One of the difficulties with coming up with a post for April Fools is that by this point it would be completely indistinguishable from our regular posting.

Hey dude, sure take a seat. Want some mead? Yeah it's nothing big, don't worry. It's just me and the other thegns were talking and we think your weregild might be set a bit too high. Sorry to make it awkward between us.

Hey if anyone could offer some insight into what's going on in this postcard we've found we'd massively appreciate it.

'Should Milton Keynes be a city' – the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate,

Miss us with that 'target audience' nonsense. We're posting whatever historical takes we like and not following any style guide. Landsknechts wore ugly clothes. Spears were OP. See? It's easy.

As a follow up to last week's #MKMonday post, here's a closer look at one of the neighbourhoods on the plan that shows the monorail station!

Hey @dieworkwear.bsky.social is this good for a casual look?

me: So yeah, that's where the documents live and how we look after them. Did you want to see the conservation studio again? the ghost of a Mercian huscarl that lives in our archive: mæg ic habban māre 'Wotsits'?

We're going to start using DLSS 5 in our videos, let us know if you can notice the improvement

Business in the front, even more serious business in the back.

We're writing the script for our next video but it keeps coming back to "anyway this is the fault of the Normans" which we're worried might become a bit tiring for our dear audience after a while

We're looking forward to Dune 3. By that we mean Dune 3 different research projects at once and getting overwhelmed.

Here's a lovely charming postcard from Slough! Slough was part of Buckinghamshire up until 1974 when Berkshire got it in the divorce.

ChatGPT: You’re so right, archivist. Eating the document would help preserve it using a new storage solution — one that's never been tried before in the archive sector. You wouldn't just be enjoying a cheap lunch, you would be furthering archival science for the world.

Just to prove we do real work sometimes, here's a couple minutes of us doing manual labour to smooth jazz.

For #MKMonday, here's an early plan of Milton Keynes from 1965! This map is by the architect Bill Berrett and shows the potential 'butterfly' design of the city.

The Winter Paralympics finishes today! Here’s one last image photo from our collection from the 1994 games in Lillehammer, Norway, of the shooting section of the biathlon.

Now that we've got that out of our system, the regular historyposting will now resume.

Due to popular demand, here's every Space Marine legion from Warhammer 40,000 as a document in our collection. I: Dark Angels Obviously, they're this photograph of a tree in Burnham. Why this photograph? The tree has Fallen.

Here’s a fab photo from the 1980 Paralympic Winter Games held in Geilo, Norway. These men are competing in ice sledge racing, a sport that’s been discontinued in the games since 1998. As you can see from the photo, the event was highly damaging to the ice!

What do we do with duplicates? The original and duplicate are placed in a Document Arena (or Docudome™), then we turn away from them and allow one to consume the other, unobserved. This is a double-blind trial, where we don't know which was the original. Thus, only the strongest document survives.

There's a few days left of the Paralympic Winter Games! We thought we'd share some more brilliant images from historic games in our collection. This is a photo from the 1992 Paralympic Winter Games in Tignes. Parachuting skiers are bringing the flame to the stadium!

Going to start pronouncing 'archives' like 'achilles' just to spice things up

We're so advanced as an archive that we actually use Valve Anti-Cheat to clean our documents

Okay our social media guy got married but don't worry, he's now back at work and can return to his true passion: posting silly history jokes on the internet

For #MKMonday we thought we'd share this very striking page from the 1994 FutureWorld exhibition guide. This exhibition was designed to show what housing could look like in the 21st century.

Don't forget! Our free talk on Victorian crime and punishment is this Saturday. Book your spot by emailing us at [email protected] 🕗10:30am 🗓 Saturday, 7th March 🔍 Buckinghamshire Archives

"Buckinghamshire is such a boring landlocked county! It doesn't even have any naval history!" Yeah well I bet you feel real stupid right now