Qualla: National Motorcycle Museum (UK)

National Motorcycle Museum (UK): Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TR001, CC BY 3.0. Shortly before 5pm on 16 September 2003, someone in a designated smoking area outside the National Motorcycle Museum stubbed out a cigarette, or thought they had. The butt landed in a pile of cardboard boxes holding old air-conditioning filters. Within an hour the fire had climbed into the museum's dropped ceilings and run laterally through the entire complex. Staff and conference delegates ran inside again and again, wheeling motorcycles out by hand. They saved more than three hundred. Three of the five exhibition halls burnt to their footings, and 380 motorcycles were lost. The fire was visible for fifteen miles across the West Midlands countryside. It cost roughly £14 million in damage. The world's largest collection of British motorcycles had, in ninety minutes, become significantly smaller.

Image: TR001 | CC BY 3.0

National Motorcycle Museum (UK): One Man's Collection

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TR001, CC BY-SA 3.0. The National Motorcycle Museum was the personal project of W.R. Roy Richards, a construction entrepreneur and self-made millionaire who had begun collecting British motorcycles in the 1970s. By 1984 he had amassed enough to open a museum, on an eight-acre site at Bickenhill in So...

Image: TR001 | CC BY-SA 3.0

National Motorcycle Museum (UK): Iron of a Vanished Industry

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pyobon at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0. What the displays show is a national industry that no longer exists. BSA, Triumph and Norton, the three names that defined the British bike to the rest of the world in the mid-twentieth century, all collapsed in the 1970s under competition from Japanese manufacturers who built fa...

Image: Pyobon at English Wikipedia | CC BY 3.0

National Motorcycle Museum (UK): The Golden Dream

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TR001, CC BY 3.0. One Brough Superior in the collection has no equivalent anywhere. The Brough Superior Golden Dream is the prototype George Brough built for the 1938 Olympia motorcycle show in London, a hand-built showpiece engineered with the help of the racer and tuner Freddie Dixon. Its engine...

Image: TR001 | CC BY 3.0

National Motorcycle Museum (UK): Rebuilt with Sprinklers

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thruxton, CC BY 3.0. After the 2003 fire, Roy Richards spent £20 million rebuilding. The new halls included a £1.2 million sprinkler system; the original buildings had carried smoke detectors and fire alarms but not sprinklers, which was the difference that mattered. The fire crews had also been hobb...

Image: Thruxton | CC BY 3.0