Brooklands Museum - Collection

Collection

The Museum is open daily and 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 (for example, the flyable Bleriot XI and Sopwith Camel replicas built by Mike Beach and Viv Bellamy, respectively) 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', opened in August 2006, centenary celebrations occurred in 2007 and a full-size modern working replica of Alliott Verdon Roe's 1908 'Avroplane' was completed and unveiled on 7 June 2008.

The Museum also owns and, until late 2009, operated 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. Having helped commemorate the 90th anniversaries of the world's first Transatlantic flight and the first flight from England to Australia, the aeroplane was finally retired and flown into Brooklands on 15 November 2009. Less than a week later it was on display with a supporting exhibition in the Museum's main hangar. The Museum's latest aircraft exhibit is the fuselage of the Supermarine Swift F.4 prototype, WK198, which held the World Absolute Air Speed Record when flown by test pilot Mike Lithgow in Libya on 26 September 1953. This historic exhibit arrived from the former RAF Millom Museum (closed in 2010) in Cumbria and arrived at Brooklands on 3 February 2011.

The Museum celebrated the centenary of the opening of the Brooklands Circuit in 2007, 100 years of aviation at Brooklands in 2008 and the Test Hill's centenary in 2009. 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 and lists the names of almost 90 people killed when Vickers was badly bombed on 4 September and also the names of Luftwaffe aircrew casualties that day. 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.