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Brooklands Museum has been awarded a grant of £200,000 from Arts Council England’s Museum Resilience Fund, towards the Museum’s ambitious Brooklands Aircraft Factory & Race Track Revival Project. Coming on top of the recent grant of £4.681million from the Heritage Lottery Fund, this latest contribution means that the project is 95% funded, leaving the Museum with around £370,000 still to raise.
and at-risk smaller items in the Museum’s collection. The reading room will provide improved research facilities for writers, historians, students and specialist groups wishing to explore the archives and reserve collections. The new workshop will enable the delivery of an Aviation Heritage Skills Training Programme which will train volunteers from Brooklands and other organisations in the highest standards of preservation, conservation and restoration of aircraft, as well as providing much The Arts Council grant will go towards a new improved conditions for volunteers working climate-controlled archive store, a training on the Museum’s restoration projects. and restoration workshop and a reading and research room which will be housed The upper floor of the Flight Shed will house inside the “Flight Shed”, which is being built the active machines amongst the Museum’s as part of the Brooklands Aircraft Factory & outstanding collection of historic aircraft, Race Track Revival Project. The archive with a bridge providing a direct link from store will be the first purpose-built, there to the Finishing Straight of the original environmentally-controlled storage space Brooklands race track of 1907 (also being for the internationally significant archives restored within the project) to allow these
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An update from Gaydon: “Work is progressing on the Heritage Motor Centre’s new Museum Collections Centre, a new building, separate to the main Museum that will house the vehicles which we don’t have room to show in the museum, together with the reserve car collection of our project partner, the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust. It will allow the public access to view these entire collections for the first time and also
Second World War Wellington Hangar (to be relocated and restored during the works) into ‘The Brooklands Aircraft Factory’, where visitors will be able to see (and try for themselves) how aircraft were designed and built at Brooklands over a 80-year period.
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Javelin fighter and return it to the City in which it was built almost 60 years ago. Once at the museum the jet will be assessed before a fundraising campaign is launched to pay for its restoration. "We are delighted to have secured the future of this rare example of the famous Gloster fighter," said museum chairman, Darren Lewington. "Built at Hucclecote in 1956, this is the world's only surviving FAW The Jet Age Museum have been successful 4 Javelin and spent much of its operational in their bid to acquire a 1956 Gloster life as a test and trials aircraft at GAC
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aircraft to be brought out for engine runs and taxying demonstrations. The third main focus of the Brooklands Aircraft Factory and Race Track Revival project will be to transform the Museum’s Grade II listed
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(Gloster Aircraft Company)." For more than twenty years the aircraft has done duty as Gate Guardian at RAF Leeming. The Gloster Aircraft Company built planes using jet engines designed by British engineer Sir Frank Whittle, who died in 1996, aged 89. Sir Frank's son, Ian, is a patron of the Jet Age Museum which has had 25,000 visitors since it reopened in August 2013. The museum is also home to one of the three surviving Gloster Unibus motor scooters, made in 1920.
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be the place where our cars are looked the museum, from some of the oldest after, with a fantastic new workshop facility. British cars, to sports cars and one-off prototypes, some of which have been rarely The project is one of the most ambitious on display to the public before. There will undertaken at the Heritage Motor Centre also be a wide selection of models from the since it opened in 1993. Costing over £4 world’s most comprehensive public million, the Museum Collections Centre is collection of Jaguars and Daimlers. funded by a £1.4 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, together with A new workshop for the Trusts’ skilled generous gifts from our two main sponsors, technicians is also an important part of the Jaguar Land Rover and building and you will be able to watch as the Garfield Weston they carry out the busy daily task of looking Foundation, as well as after such large and varied collections. money from both Trusts. In all, it will be a really different way of seeing our collections and a chance for you Inside the new building to get behind the scenes and experience there will be nearly 250 how a large museum ticks”. cars; the same mix of interesting and unusual motor cars that are in