Following our winter closure, the museum re-opens on Saturday, 15th February, for the 2020 season.
The week before re-opening is always a busy one as final preparation of new displays is underway and the “big clean” takes place. This year, on the Wednesday before re-opening, there were at least 16 museum staff and volunteers beavering away. Everything looks bright and shiny and a few spiders are now looking for new homes.
What is new for 2020? Well to a casual observer wandering around the museum this week, the Paved Paradise gallery has been shuffled with the Imp, Herald, Mini and Volvo moving around and being joined by a Sinclair C5.
The Toy Galleries have had a lot of work done having been completely emptied over the winter and now showing new paint, floor coverings and a refreshed display.
As you leave the final gallery, a completely new, computer-controlled sound and light display tells the story of Boundless, the club which owns the museum. If you like mirrors and lights, this will be a real attraction.
We look forward to welcoming old friends and new visitors in 2020.

Anyone browsing the museum website could easily overlook the DOWNLOADS tab on the home page. This could be a mistake! Bear with me, please let me explain why.

In 2008 the museum started to publish brief documentation on the website that supported on-going museum displays. One of the very first documents, in 2008, showed that even then, we felt that the rising levels of carbon dioxide emitted by cars was an impending problem and a museum display reflecting this situation was first launched in the same year. Here is one of the graphics that we used.

Since that time, other documents, including “The Impact of Motoring”, “Our Motoring World”, “Tell-Me-More”, “Email-Me-More” and “A History of Motoring in 10 Objects” have all been available to download from the website – albeit sometimes a bit tricky to locate within the site – and accompanying an associated museum display.

Twelve years later, whilst celebrating the magnificent contribution that the museum collection makes to the history of motoring, we continue to recognise that big changes have to occur if the damage inflicted on the planet by our addiction to fossil fuels is not to be catastrophically irreversible: that, of course, includes changes to the world of motoring.

Currently, we have two sets of documents behind the DOWNLOADS tab on the website. “The Direction of Travel – Motoring from The Past to The Future” is a set of five ebooks that, following a short introduction, look at the environmental, social and technological influences that have resulted from 130 years of the motor car and which concludes with a look to the future of motoring. Will hydrogen be the future or battery electric? Just how many vehicle manufacturers brands that we recognise today will still be around in even 10 years time or will new arrivals have disrupted the scene?

Our second, concise ebook addresses “The Impact of the Internal Combustion Engine over the last 130 years and its future in the 21st century”. It directly relates to an on-going display in the museum and tries to answer, at both a European level and a global level, questions that relate to our use of oil and the health and environmental impact of that consumption.

Oh, and that reference to plastic dinosaurs (made from oil)? Well, sorry, you will just have to click the DOWNLOADS tab to find out!