Britishnewspaperarchive Reviews 

Appalling Customer Service. Can't process my PayPal Pay As You Go payment. Already taken over a week to deal with the issue. Trying to blame PayPal but PayPal works every where else for me. Wildly expensive but they've bought out the rights to the old newspapers so you can't get them elsewhere. They have a monopoly on this and on the 1921 census. All designed to rip you off!!

Further to the above, British Newspaper Archive have still not fixed the issue! They are trying to blame PayPal, my browser settings and just about anything else they can think of!!!! I have ABSOLUTELY NO issues using PayPal for other transactions. The error message that is generated is a BNA error with a BNA message saying to contact BNA to get it fixed. Despite this, EVEN AFTER ANOTHER FULL WEEK OF TRYING, they have still failed to get this sorted. AVOID THIS LOT AT ALL COSTS!!!!!!!

Auto-renewal scam. Beware.
Absolute disgrace: Just got my BNA subscription renewed for another 3 months, without being told in advance. Their auto-renewal policy requires you to proactively cancel the subscription.
On a side note: The whole BNA website is substandard. Most of the pre-1850 scanned material is literally unreadable. Poor quality. This raises real issues in terms of copyright.

I like this site. Despite some of the images being illegible I have found lots of interesting articles about my ancestors and even discovered some ancestors who I did not know existed. I have a 12-month subscription which works out at less than £2 per week!

I was excited about signing up and to have access to so many newspapers. However, I found the quality on many of the news papers was unacceptably poor and those with photos had been scanned in really dark and were ridiculously low quality, there was not one photo in the newspapers I looked at (with illustrations) that was good quality and this was due to scan quality not the newspapers . Some of the text had been cut off on some of the articles. I came across a folded newspaper so many words could not be read properly. I used my mobile and it kept logging me out too. For the money and where we are with technology today, the quality of scans should be much much better. Such a shame as the idea behind it is great. Sadly the executions leaves a lot to be desired. I hope they read the feedback and sort these issues out.

Expensive for what you actually get; as others have noted, the quality of some of the images is very poor, being either too dark or too light. Pages have to be downloaded singly, with no option to download a complete newspaper, while the titles seem heavily skewed towards London and the south east, where many papers have complete runs up to the 1990s. If you're looking for papers from the north west, what few titles are available only go up to the early 1900s. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the order in which titles are added and, despite the site's name and the glaring omissions, several overseas titles have been added for no discernible reason. Overall, a somewhat frustrating experience.

Many of the newspapers I signed up to see were unreadable due to poor quality scanning.
When I asked for a refund, they refused, citing the fact I'd looked at those unreadable images!
Do not be tempted to sign up for more than one month, despite the discounts for doing so.
Then you can assess if it's worth it for you, without losing more than the approx £12 for that month.
I cancelled the subscription and direct debit and won't be back.

The Quality of downloaded images is so poor that many of them cannot be read. You can request higher quality images at £30 a go, but it is a complete rip off that you have to pay extra for what should be part of the basic service offering ie: readable downloads. If it were not for this most alarming con-trick I would have given the site 5 stars.

Paid for this on an offer price and they ended my subscription without notice. When I tried to sign back up, I had to pay the full price, not the offer price.
Not very good for searching newspapers. Useless for searching people's full name.
90% of Welsh Newspapers are missing.