Brooklands Museum

KT13 0QN Weybridge,, Great Britain (UK)

Railway

Bus

Wikipedia:
The museum includes 4 Listed buildings:
the 1907 Brooklands Automobile Racing Club Clubhouse
and Members' Hill Restaurant buildings,
the 1911 Flight Ticket Office,
a 1940 Bellman aircraft hangar.
Surviving sections of the 1937 Campbell Circuit, the 1907 Finishing Straight and Members' Banking (the steepest section of the former racing circuit), the 1909 Test Hill, and a WW2 'Bofors' gun tower are important parts of the Brooklands Scheduled Monument which was extended in 2002.

Brooklands was the birthplace of British motorsport and aviation and the site of many engineering and technological achievements throughout eight decades of the 20th century.
 

Collection

The Museum displays a wide range of Brooklands-related motoring and aviation exhibits ranging from giant racing cars such as the 24-litre Napier-Railton, motorcycles, and bicycles to a unique collection of Hawker and Vickers/British Aircraft Corporation-built aircraft including Concorde (G-BBDG).

Certain other museum exhibits are maintained in 'live' condition and perform regular engine running demonstrations at museum events during the year. An exhibition about Grand Prix motor racing which features a Formula One simulator can also be seen.

A major new visitor attraction, 'The Concorde Experience', centenary celebrations occurred in 2007 and a full-size modern working replica of Alliott Verdon Roe's 1908 'Avroplane' was completed and unveiled in 2008.

The Museum also owns an airworthy Vickers Vimy replica which was built in America in 1994 to re-enact the design's three record-breaking long distance flights of 1919-20.

The Museum's latest aircraft exhibit is the fuselage of the Supermarine Swift F.4 prototype, WK198.

Centred on a restored Hawker Hurricane, a new exhibition about Brooklands in the Battle of Britain was unveiled on 15 September 2010; this explains how the major aircraft factories there made Brooklands a prime target for Luftwaffe bombers in 1940.

Another new exhibition about the Vickers Wellington is centred on the Loch Ness Wellington, 'R' for 'Robert' and was officially opened by Robin Holmes, Penelope Keith, Norman Parker and Ken Wallis on 15 June 2011 - the 75th anniversary of the first flight of the type's forerunner, prototype Vickers B.9/32.

In 2012, a significant Brooklands aviation anniversary - 50 years of the Vickers VC10 airliner - was marked by the staging of a VC10 Symposium and the official opening of a new VC10 exhibition by the late Sir George Edwards' daughter Angela Newton on 29 June - half a century after this remarkable aeroplane was first flown here by 'Jock' Bryce, Brian Trubshaw and Bill Cairns.

On the evening of 29 September 2012, with help from museum volunteers, contractors moved the ex-British Airways/Heathrow Airport 40% scale Concorde model G-CONC to a new location at the south end of Brooklands Drive, where it now marks the main entrance to Brooklands Museum.

The Brooklands contribution to the Royal Air Force's legendary 617 Squadron 'Dambusters' attack on Germany's Ruhr Valley reservoirs on 16-17 May 1943 was commemorated on 12 May 2013 by three impressive flypasts of Brooklands Museum given by the RAF Battle of Britain Memorial Flight's Avro Lancaster - as a special 70th anniversary tribute to Barnes Wallis and the Vickers-Armstrongs design and experimental department engineers who made the 'Upkeep' mine such a successful weapon.

The new London Bus Museum opened in new premises on land at Brooklands Museum.

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