Historical Data UK

Overview

The UK Historical Data repository has been developed jointly by the Bank of England, ESCoE and the Office for National Statistics. The site is both a repository of historical UK data and relevant statistical publications, as well as a hub that links to other data websites and sources. You can watch a short overview video here. The focus is on macroeconomic and financial market data but the site includes a range of disaggregated economic data at a sector, industry and regional level. More granular, historical microdata on the UK economy and other social science data is provided by the UK Data Service repository.

The site contains digital collections of many of the key official statistical publications produced since the C19th which were digitised specifically for this project. These generally go up to around 2010 when the Office for National Statistics moved to online digital provision of its statistical releases although some publications carry on after that date. We also link to other digital collections such as the Internet Archive, the HathiTrust Digital Library and LSE Digital Library where the material already exists online in the public domain. A significant number of excel spreadsheets containing key historical data have also been transcribed and loaded onto the site. More material will continue to be added, including additional publications, Excel transcriptions and added functionality. Some datasets are only in PDF form, but these are OCR-ready and we are hoping these will be transcribed into Excel over time. We would especially encourage researchers who do transcribe data from the site to allow us to put these datasets into the repository. More generally, researchers are more than welcome to use the repository as a means of disseminating historical datasets or methodological papers they have been working on even if the work is provisional.

The site is curated by Sylaja Srinivasan (ESCoE, Bank of England) and Ryland Thomas (ESCoE, Bank of England). Please email ryland.thomas@bankofengland.co.uk for specific questions and suggestions for the repository and info@escoe.ac.uk for more general information and feedback.

The historical economic statistics publications and datasets have been compiled and curated by ESCoE as a best endeavours project based on publicly available information as well as information from our partners. These include the Bank of England and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and many academic colleagues and rightsholders to whom we are extremely grateful for their kind permission to republish copyrighted material.

Our partners are not responsible for how the information they have provided has been used in the creation of these items, or in how they have been or may be interpreted. Repository items may report economic data which are not in line with current official statistics. If you wish to obtain current official statistics from ONS, please visit their website. Similarly official statistics on the monetary and financial system can be obtained from the Bank of England on their website.

The repository material has been organised into 15 sections allowing users to browse to subject areas of interest. A short video explaining the content of these pages is available here. Users looking for a particular publication can find an index listing the set of digitised publications available in the repository here.