In my opinion, the London Metropolitan Archive (LMA) is a good place to start in London. The LMA was the first archive I visited here. This was largely because, with the exception of the British Library, it is the closest to where I am staying in Bloomsbury. The archive, which is located off of Farringdon Road in Islington, is about a twenty minute walk away. I will admit that it took me several attempts to locate the archive, but this was because I was operating under the assumption that the street the archive was on actually came out unto Farringdon Road, which it does not. It instead becomes the tributary of a slightly larger street about 10 or 20 yards earlier.
Unlike the British Library, the LMA is a very low pressure environment and well suited to people who aren't very familiar with working in archives. The staff is very patient and kind. Most of the people who visit the archive are retirees researching their family history. This is apparently the place to visit if your family is from London. I once overheard an archive worker tell a school group that Barbara Windsor of EastEnders fame came here to research her family tree. I hope the children were as impressed as I was. Despite the large number of amateur genealogists, the archive really is the place to go for researching the history of the City of London's government. The LMA holds all the administrative records of the Corporation of London.
It's a pleasant place to work, despite ongoing renovations. The reading room is light and airy with a lot of windows for an archive. They also allow you to take pictures, though you will have to pay for a permit each day (£2.70) and list everything you photograph on a form.
I am not the biggest fan of their online catalog, but they do have one and, as far as I can tell, there are no glaring omissions. The catalog requires a bit too much clicking for my taste and sometimes lists large series of records out of order. It also occasionally has items labeled as unavailable when they are available as microfilms rather than in their original form. A visit to the paper catalog at the archive easily remedies this problem, however.
One of my chief, though rather un-academic, concerns when visiting an archive is what to do about lunch. Is there a place to eat lunch? Is there a place to buy lunch? The LMA's lounge usually provides a sufficient number of tables and chairs to eat at, though on very busy days you might have to share a table. The lounge has two vending machines – one which sells snacks and one which dispenses indescribably hot liquids. Unlike most vending machines, the hot drink machine also accepts pennies and tuppence. The unwieldy and worthless two pence piece is the bane of my existence so I am usually more than happy to deposit mine here.
Right across the street from the archive is a lovely little park with benches which is also a good place to eat lunch when the weather is nice. Exmouth Market, the next street over, has a number of small little restaurants, newsagents, and a Starbucks. There is something to suit most budgets and tastes. There are also often a number of stands set up in the market selling other delicacies.
Overall, it's a good archive and it has the added bonus of being open on Monday when the National Archives is not.
The catalog sounds like it could be worse. I once had to drag the archivist at the Florentine Archivio di Stato over to a computer and hold up the manuscript I was using next to the digitized image on the screen in order to make him understand that despite being two completely different documents, they were cataloged under the same number. He refused to believe me until I did this.
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