My understanding is that the building’s closing overall next spring but that the ground floor search room closed at the end of October. I can’t remember which of the services caused it - one of them decided to pull out, which made the whole place unviable. Moving content to Kew is all well and good, but compared to the FRC it’s a nightmare to get to unless you’re already nearby.

“Hatches, matches and despatches” used to be a column in some terribly geeky genealogy magazine, non? FreeBMD is great, but I do miss the old brown-ink copperplate of the earlier bound volumes…