In 1863 the social reformer William Rogers (1819–1896) became the rector of St Botolph’s Church in the Bishopsgate ward of London. There, he found a sum of accumulated donations earmarked for charitable causes and used them to fund an institute for providing education for his working-class congregation.1 His dream was realised in 1895, when the Bishopsgate Institute finally opened.In 1897, a year after Rogers’s death, Charles Goss, then in his early thirties, was appointed Head Librarian of the Institute. Goss was born in 1864, the son of a plasterer, and grew up in inner London. He experienced first-hand the struggles of working-class life and was naturally aligned with Bishopsgate’s ethos of serving the local community.The board of governors at Bishopsgate had hired Goss to develop a subscription library, that is, a library which the inhabitants of the borough could pay to access. Unbeknownst to the board, however, Goss built an archive chronicling the lives of the local working classes, the history of trade unions, the labour movement, and the stories of political protest.2 Goss’s actions were strikingly different to how historically archives were developed. Archives until this time had tended to focus on royalty, nobility, the clergy, and prominent figures in business and industry.Amongst these stories is the archive of a Victorian-era politician and activist named George Howell. This collection reflects the political and social interests of Howell, who had been instrumental in initiatives such as the London Builders’ strikes of 1859 calling for a nine-hour working day, and campaigns for Universal Suffrage. Another collection, the Wensley Family Archive, preserves the life and work of Frederick Wensley, the son of a shoemaker. Despite humble beginnings, Wensley became Chief Constable of Scotland Yard, and had published a memoir of his involvement in the hunt for Jack the Ripper. During Goss’s lifetime, archives were often considered ‘neutral and unproblematic reservoirs of historical fact’, and the archivist a ‘passive and impartial guardian of the surviving traces of the past’,3 who simply maintained those traces for the historian. This view was recognised as the idea of historical objectivity, an approach to history popularised by the 19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke. According to von Ranke, the historian should set out ‘a strict presentation of facts’ from careful interpretation of (especially primary) sources.4 In the 1960’s, a decade and a half after Goss’s death, in a world disillusioned by war, the spread of postmodernism challenged the idea of a single objective truth. Philosophers such as Michel Foucault and later Jacques Derrida wanted to understand how ideas come to be accepted as fact, and how truth and reality are, in fact, constructed rather than observed. They pointed out the flexible and evolving, rather than fixed, nature of language, and the importance of context which can radically change the impact and meaning of words. Their influence spanned many fields from architecture and literary criticism to theology and feminism. One particular outcome of their work was the Archival Turn.The Archival Turn challenged established views on historical fact and the part played by historians in its creation. Foucault was the first to acknowledge the role of the archive in creating, and not simply preserving, history. He scrutinised the archive itself as the source of knowledge production, examining how social hierarchies and individual choice determined what entered the archives, and subsequently what became the telling of history. What can we learn from Goss’s Bishopsgate? Little is known about how documents actually accumulated at Bishopsgate during Goss’s tenure. Judging from the nature of the collection itself we can see that Goss chose to preserve a slice of history that personally interested him. Without him, the lives of those working-class Londoners may have otherwise disappeared without a trace. However this does not also mean that the collection was a comprehensive mirror of society of the time: anything that did not interest him remained unrepresented in the archives.We now know that without initiatives such as the Black Cultural Archives, which since 1981 has sought to collect and preserve documents reflecting the history of black people in the UK, people like Ignatius Sancho, the first African prose writer to be published in England, may have fallen into obscurity.There are always silences in the archives — gaps where no trace remains, or those whose lives are only reflected through the perspective of others, such as the lawyer’s view of the criminal, or the doctor’s view of the patient. For most cases, it is now too late to retrospectively fill in those silences, but by closely examining how a particular archive was collected we can, at the very least, identify the existence of those gaps. Bishopsgate Institute has grown since Charles Goss, expanding on his interests to include areas such as LGBTQ+ and gender history. In keeping with Goss’s intentions the institute continues to deliberately seek out collections of individuals and groups who are often left out of mainstream archives — from the Leather and Fetish collection to the collections of Stop the War and Catwalks 4 Power, even placards and banners collected after protests like the Women’s March, and anti-Trump protests. These actions by today’s archivists — such as attending marches and asking for placards — will also shape the history of our own time, when interpreted by historians of the future. But which protests will be chosen? What placards?