Grace's Guide: Pipe and Tobacco Records in the British Industrial Archive

Grace's Guide, fully Grace's Guide to British Industrial History, is an online reference that compiles Britain's industrial and manufacturing past through company, product, and personal records. The organization states it began publishing in 2007 and is registered as a charity in England and Wales under number 1154342. The name says nothing to a pipe enthusiast at first glance, yet tobacco and pipe manufacturing are also part of British industrial history and have found a place in the archive.

The Archive's Structure

The site works on a wiki logic. A separate page opens for each company or person, information is mostly given as bullet points arranged in chronological order, and beneath each line is noted which journal or directory it was drawn from. Most of the material comes from digitized engineering and industrial periodicals; the organization states it has scanned thousands of publications from between 1833 and 1950. The collection is not static: while around 150,000 pages and 235,000 images were reported in 2022, by early 2026 these figures had, according to the records, risen past 171,000 pages and 248,000 images; the numbers should be taken as approximate since they change as new donations are scanned. Pages can be read online for free, while downloading documents as PDF is a paid service.