This week 807 years of Kingston history kept tucked away re-opened to the public.

Charters that shaped the borough’s laws and buildings, hundreds of years of electoral roles, thousands of Kingston photographs and 161 years of Surrey Comet newspapers were finally put on display in the new History Centre housed in the former Kingston Magistrates’ Court under the Guildhall building in High Street. It has not been a smooth ride for the archives since they were forced to leave their permanent home in the North Kingston Centre last year after it was earmarked as a site for one of the borough’s first free schools.

To add further misery, plans to move the borough’s history to a referral unit for excluded schoolchildren were ditched at the 11th hour, leaving the archives homeless for six months. After an interim spell at Surbiton library where history buffs could order specific archives to view one day a week, the archives finally settled into Guildhall. For borough archivist Gillian Butler, finally having a permanent home in a historic building in the heart of Kingston, has been a dream come true.

Having started her career as a Saturday girl in Croydon’s history rooms, Miss Butler moved from the National Army Museum to take the new job looking after Kingston’s treasures. A woman who loves her local history, Miss Butler says she is happy to have a job where she can share this love with like-minded people.

The Story of Tolworth co-writer Bob Phillips (who interrupted the interview with some breaking news – from 1928) had been searching the archives for information about Cleveland Road, Old Malden, for an upcoming Street Museum event being hosted next month.

Mr Phillips was the first man into the history rooms when they opened to the public on Wednesday, October 27. He was euphoric. Having previously researched and written about Tolworth, he argued it should never be thought of as the “forgotten end of the borough”. There is plenty of information in the new History Centre to back this up, he said.

Historian Shaan Butters also had her nose buried in ancient documents on day one. Mrs Butters wrote That Famous Place: A History of Kingston upon Thames, and was scouring 19th century court assembly minutes looking for evidence that a Prussian general visited the borough. Kingston’s History Centre has archives that include maps, photographs, microfilmed newspapers and books with some ancient finds dating back to 1208. Kingston Council leader Kevin Davis visited the History Centre this week too.