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Many areas of the country's history are represented under one roof and an increasingly popular section is the records for Britain's military, including ship logs, personnel and campaign medal records and operational records.
Family historians and anyone interested in their ancestors or even military work they were involved in themselves many years ago are able to come and look at the records which may relate to a grandfather who fought in the First World War or even an ancestor who served under Nelson in the Napoleonic wars.
The Archives are also used by current serving personnel to help inform them when planning strategic operations taking place now.
Research experts at the Archives advise that when searching for records about a particular serviceman or woman, you arrive as best prepared as possible, which includes gathering together some basic information which could save months of searching.
William Spencer, who is the Principal Specialist in Military Records at the National Archives, said:
"It's not really good enough to say his name was John Smith and I think he was in the Army, because you're just going to come up against a brick wall. Name, rank, number really does help and a rough idea of when the individual served. Or if they were in the Royal Navy, the name of a ship that they served on at any given time.
"If you come in with broad swathes, you're going to pick up too much material so the more specific you can be, the better. Even coming into the 20th century, for example, for John Smith in the First World War, the records of service we have are on 52 reels of microfilm that relates to 52,000 images."
Mr Spencer who himself is a veteran, having served in the Royal Navy for 13 years, and who saw operational service during the Falklands, explained that each Service has a different way of making records on their personnel based on different information:
"We've got effective records from the Army from 1760 up until 1920," he said. "The Royal Navy really effectively from 1800 to 1928 and for the RAF primarily just the First World War material. All three Services do things differently. The Royal Navy do records by when they join. The Army does it when an individual leaves and the RAF do it by numbers.
"For the Royal Navy we have ships' logs, for example we have the log for HMS Victory for the Battle of Trafalgar. We get to the First World War where we have operational records and combat reports and the Second World War operational records for the Air Force so we have the operational report for 617 Squadron for the Dambusters in 1943."
The hundreds of records in the Archives have informed thousands of people throughout the years, providing not only family historians and military history enthusiasts with a myriad of information, but also aiding current Service personnel in planning strategic operations in theatre. Mr Spencer said:
"There are a number of different reasons why individual unit war diaries were created and it was a day-to-day account of activities and a source of information for any historian and basically for learning processes so we can read a diary and think 'Oh, that's how they did it'.
"When the British Army was operating in the Balkans in the 1990s, we had Army officers in here looking at unit war diaries relating to the British Army in the First World War, specifically in Italy, to look at how they went about mountain fighting, and how they did it then and how those lessons might be applied to the British Army in the 90s.
"A record is never just a representation of what went on then and is dormant - history is circular, you can use something again, and again, and again, and hopefully the lessons get learned. A record which is a hundred years old can be used to inform and advise the current Armed Forces."
So many secrets have been unearthed within the National Archives and stories that have lain undiscovered have been given room to breathe and share their incredible and amazing experiences. Mr Spencer has had the opportunity to help many people find awe- inspiring information within the Archives but one particular memory remains resolutely strong:
"A little old lady, who must have been about four foot ten [1.5m], trundled in and said that she was very interested to read the Ultra Decrypts. Now, Ultra was the breaking of the Enigma Code and ultimately the information. So I said to her that they were in series DEFE3, so she trundled away and at the end of the week - she was here all week reading these things - she came back and she said to me 'I typed those during the war and I always wondered what they meant'."
In maintaining the National Archives we will always be able to find out and discover more about our own country's military history and the roles our ancestors played in the various wars that the UK has been involved in.
And Mr Spencer thinks that within the Archives there is more information just waiting to be found:
"There are lots of discoveries still to be made as people haven't discovered that little piece of paper stuffed in a file that might tell them a story. Our catalogue descriptions are very broad on the cover so it's only when you get into it that you discover that it's more interesting than the description says. There are lots of stories still waiting to be unlocked."
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