I last went to the British Motor Museum – previously the British Heritage Motor Museum – back in 2017 when the BMW National Festival was held there. Since then, there have been a number of additions to the displays, and as it’s only half an hour from where I now live, my partner Carolyn and I decided to pay a visit last Sunday afternoon – in fact, it was actually her idea; she has yet to let on what she wants in exchange…
When I was there as part of the BMW Festival, there were literally thousands of visitors; this time, the number was no more than a couple of hundred, making viewing and taking photographs that much easier. We pulled up in die Tomate an hour or so after lunch and had our entry tickets converted to annual passes at no extra cost as, living so close, there’s a strong chance that I at least might go again within the next 12 months.
When the museum was originally opened back in 1993 as the Heritage Motor Centre, it primarily showcased British Leyland and associated companies’ histories, but over time this has been expanded to encompass the British motor industry as a whole, although Ford and the Rootes Group are only represented in small numbers. I expect the Coventry Transport Museum will have a greater emphasis on the Coventry-based Rootes companies’ cars.
There are two main buildings on the site – which neighbours Jaguar Land Rover and Aston Martin’s head offices. The original Art-Deco influenced semi-circular museum building that houses the core collection – a mezzanine floor was added to the original building in 2006/7 – and exhibition and storage space was further increased with the opening of the Collections Centre in late 2015, which focuses on Jaguar Daimler downstairs, and a wide selection of cars old and more recent upstairs; more on this later.
Also that year, the name of the museum was changed to the British Motor Museum, as it’s known today. The most recent major change has been the transfer in August of this year of the Vauxhall Heritage Collection from the cramped site at Luton, and it’s all the better for that, as you can now walk around the cars properly. In the 1950’s and ’60’s, before merging their product lines with Opel, many of Vauxhall’s cars looked like slightly smaller American cars – wide grilles, rear tail fins, and in some cases, also mimicked their size, especially with their top of the range Cresta, Victor and Velox models, which were big cars by European standards.
The Vauxhall section also showed off some of the Luton company’s performance saloons – a 1970 Viva GT (unusually without matt black bonnet), a 1975 Firenza HPF “Droop Snoot”, 1984 white Astra GT/E Mk1, and Vauxhall’s most extreme road car, the 177mph Lotus Carlton, one of the ultimate wolves in sheep’s clothing.
The museum has a number of themed zones , one covering Motorsport, another covering prototypes – a fascinating selection, with still more in the Collections Centre – and another tracing the history of the industry along what the curator have cleverly called Time Road. Even the “road” surface changes as we move through the decades. The cars are arranged in two lanes going in opposite directions, the one slight problem with this part of the collection being that they are very close together – nose to tail – and it’s difficult to get a good photograph of some of them.
The “road” is filled with interesting cars – the oldest surviving Rover, a 1904 8hp, Sir William Morris’s personal 1921 Morris Oxford F-Type, a huge blue 1907 Austin 40hp York Landaulette, with an interior tall enough for Herbert Austin to keep his hat on and many more.
Moving through the decades and road surfaces we come across cars that our grandparents and parents drove – an Austin Princess, a Vauxhall Viva HA, a 1982 Ford Cortina 2.0 Ghia, an Austin 1100, Britain’s biggest selling car in its time and a Hillman Imp. Along the walls key dates and stories are outlined, such as the year the driving test was introduced (1935, since you ask).
The Motorsport section covers BL’s track and rallying history – the mighty Jaguar XJC and XJ12 touring cars, a glorious D-Type, the Healey 3000, Triumph TR7 and fearsome MG Metro 6R4 rally cars, and of course a trio of Mini Coopers, racing machines such as Sir Jackie Stewart’s iconic March 701 as well as some of the ultra-streamlined MG land speed cars, which look incredibly claustrophobic.
From Rover’s experiments with gas turbine engines in the 1950’s and ‘60’s, perhaps the stand-out car is the 1965 Rover- BRM that was entered in Le Mans that year. It’s a terrific-looking sports racer, to my eyes, at least. Earlier versions had been entered in the 24-hour race the previous two years, but this one, driven by Jackie Stewart and Graham Hill, actually finished 10th. Unfortunately, these experiments proved to be a dead end.
One car that I don’t recall seeing before was a huge but graceful 1950 Daimler DE36 “Green Goddess” coupé. Only seven of these 20-foot long beauties were built, and with a price tag of £7,000 (over a quarter of a million pounds in today’s money) that’s probably not surprising. Despite being powered by a 5.5-litre eight-cylinder engine, its top speed was a modest 83mph, but this was definitely more a case of travelling in style rather than trying to get to your destination quickly.
At least as interesting as the cars that were sold to the British public were those that didn’t make it to dealer showrooms. How about the SD1 shooting brake – which I think looks pretty good, or the putative Stag replacement, the 1978 TR7-based Lynx fastback, which works less well and looks positively clumsy next to the wild and vivid orange Vauxhall XVR concept from 1966, sadly not a driver, and probably had next to no chance of ever being produced.
A couple of cars that I firmly believe BL should have green-lit are two small sports cars – the 1964 MG/Mini ADO34 roadster and the 1970 MG/Mini ADO70, complete with targa top. These terrific little sports cars look great, and would surely have been a success? While on this theme, one of the cars in the Collections Centre that I also think the company should have built was the Michelotti-designed 1972 Triumph Dolomite, a neat update that again failed to reach production.
This brings me neatly to the Collections Centre (I don’t just make this up as I go along, you know), where the ground floor contains a wonderful display of Jaguars through the ages, curated by the Jaguar Heritage Trust. Evolution rather than revolution – a very Germanic concept in car manufacturing – was the strategy, and it’s very interesting to see just how subtly the company updated its cars, from the XK120/140/150, the Series 1, 2 and 3 E-types, Mk1 and Mk2 saloons, through to the XJ6/ 12.
Another car that I hadn’t seen in previous visits to the museum was an XJ40 shooting brake from 1992 – intriguingly with a transparent display bonnet. The extended roof-line suits the car well – in fact, it seems to me that estate versions of saloons often look better than the cars they are based on – I’m thinking of examples like the Montego, the Cortina, the Cavalier. I think this extends to modern cars; a current 5-series BMW Touring looks much better than the four-door. Your mileage may vary, of course.
For me, the most interesting car here was the aubergine 1963 Daimler SP252 – designed by William Lyons to replace the guppy fish-faced SP250, this was a major improvement on the earlier car, but the new body took more than twice as long to build as that of the SP250. This car is privately owned and is on loan to the museum until March 2021 – I really liked it.
Moving upstairs, this area is basically a storage facility, so although there is information on every car there, they’re not really displayed as such. There are some hidden gems – I’ve already mentioned the Dolomite, but there are a number of experimental vehicles tucked away as well as a number of cars that did make the showrooms.
One that I was particularly intrigued by was the 1966 Rover 2000S prototype; designed by David Bache, originally as a replacement for the Alvis 3-litre despite its Rover badging, this two-door fastback doesn’t quite work but maybe a little tinkering might have turned this into a very pretty car. In the end, nothing came of it. David Bache kept the car, and it is now in the ownership of Paul Bache.
Motoring footnotes such as these make for fascinating viewing, and it’s to the Museum’s credit that these experiments can be seen by the public.
With some 300 cars just in the main building, there’s a lot to take in, and there’s another 250 or so in the Collections Centre, and I can genuinely recommend a visit if you’re with a reasonable distance – and at the moment, your standard entry ticket gets you 12 months’ access. The exhibits are rotated every couple of months (though some are more or less permanent). Check out the museum’s website here – the British Motor Museum is definitely worth a half day of your time.
