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Earlier this year The Museum of British Road Transport re-launched itself as the Coventry Transport Museum. This Museum boasts the largest collection of British road transport exhibits anywhere in the world has been extended and improved to include a sweeping new glass frontage and four major new galleries. This ambitious project at the heart of Coventry's city centre regeneration scheme, cost £7.5 million and has taken four years to complete. It's the first time a motor museum has ever been used for city regeneration. Millennium Place at the front of the Museum is a wide-open space where many motoring and other activities can take place.
Though the first museum of transport in Coventry did not open until late 1980 its roots go back to 1937 when Sammy Bartleet presented the City with his collection of over 70 historic bicycles From that small beginning the collection has grown to 240 cars, commercial vehicles and buses, 94 motorcycles and over 200 cycles. There are over 25,000 model cars and around a million items of archive or ephemera. The Museums policy is to collect and display the products of the City or ones that were extensively used there, and it focuses on the skills, expertise and innovations of its people. It is quite obvious that the Museum has a bias towards social history. |
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To give some idea of the Gallery space now available, it totals some 125,000 sq ft (11,574 square metres) which is twice the floor space of Beaulieu or Gaydon. As you enter the Museum from Millennium Place you are bound to notice the lack of pay desks - this is a free admission museum! To the right is a space for ever-changing special exhibitions.
Immediately you enter the first gallery, a new introduction to some of the wide variety of makes from Coventry, you are immediately struck by the lack of barriers. Great for the visitor but this must be a headache for the Curators as the cars, motorcycles and bicycles can be, and are, touched. Sadly all vehicles are bereft of their radiator caps and mascots. This is obviously for security but it really is a pity, they do not look right with out this radiator adornment. This opening gallery contains one lovely quote, from one Stewart Morbey and one we can all sympathise with "My father was the first in our street to have a car, now there is hardly any space to park". Here we find a Maudslay rubbing wings with a Calcott, Standard with Daimler, Armstrong Siddeley with Rover, Riley with Humber. Then there was the Albatros a Coventry make of which 12 were manufactured in 1923 and 1924 and only 2 survive. Another car to survive in small numbers (possibly 2) was the Crouch Carette built in 1912 which is seen in the "Land Marques" gallery surrounded by the paraphernalia of "Votes for Women". This gallery takes you from the horse drawn days, with the aid of the blacksmith's shop, through coach building to a street scene with Queen Mary's Daimler visiting the city in 1935.
Coventry was of course very badly damaged in the blitz and I am delighted that the previous short but very effective display on the bombing remains - most evocative. There is a gallery devoted to Standard, Triumph and Jaguar, another takes you through the boom years of the 50's, 60's and 70's and this has now been brought up to date with a section of the 80's and 90's. Whilst the Museum admits that the magnificent Bartleet Rooms full of the Museum's cycle collection needs redisplay it is still well worth the visit, this collection is regarded as one of the best in the world. The motorcycle collection again is awaiting redisplay.
In 2003 a new exhibition opened around two of this country's Land Speed Record breaking cars that has been very skilfully put together. Both Thrust 2 and Thrust SSC are the brainchild of Richard Noble. Richard took the record in Thrust 2 at 633.468 mph in October 1983. Andy Green with Thrust SSC took it to 763.035mph in 1997 breaking the sound barrier in the process. Both these great cars are shown in a sound and light setting which tells you something of the frustrations and the elation of this very particular branch of motor sport. For the Thrust SSC experience you are placed in a motion simulator and you travel across the Black Rock Nevada desert at the record breaking speed, you experience the afterburner cutting in, the sound barrier being broken and the way in which at these incredible speeds the pilot (Andy is an RAF fighter pilot) corrects (with rear wheel steering!) a strong sideways drift. As you slow down you feel the parachute come out. Whilst all this is happening Andy Green talks you through it!
The old Museum was good, but this is much better. Sadly not all of the collection can be shown, there are no commercials but these may well re-appear next year in another extension to the building.
The Museum is in Millennium Place off Hales Street, Coventry. Clearly signed by brown tourist signs from the ring road and on foot from all directions. For more information see www.transport-museum.com e-mail museum@mbrt.co.uk Telephone 024 7683 2425 ... and remember it's free!
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