A vast archive showing Thomas Cook's 178-year history is now online

The collection includes uniforms, travel guides and posters.

Part of a huge archive spanning the history Thomas Cook can now be looked at online.

If all the boxes of photographs, diaries, letters, minutes, accounts, reports, contracts, volumes, objects, artefacts and posters were laid out in a line, it would be 250 metres long which is around 2.5 times the length of the playing surface at the King Power Stadium.

Jennifer Roach, Project Archivist, said: “The Thomas Cook archive is internationally significant, as it provides a detailed historical record of the man and company which created international package travel as we know it today. It is a great honour for us to have been chosen as the permanent home of the Thomas Cook archive and we believe it is vital that we can make the material as accessible as possible."

The collection also has 60,000 photographs and souvenirs, including glass and china, uniforms through the ages and a model of a Nile steamer.

A grant from the National Archives meant that a portion of the giant archive could be catalogued and is now available to search online.

Jennifer Roach said: “We’re aiming to keep uploading records to the catalogue throughout the course of the project, with the full catalogue online and the collection available from next April when the project concludes. We will then showcase some of the material in the Thomas Cook Collection, highlighting the gems we have found along the way.”