A Guide to the Transport Museums of Great Britain

In one lifetime powered flight was born and has bred Concorde. The private motor car has evolved from an eccentric form of transport for a privileged few to the popular choice of the majority. In public transport the steam locomotive, the trolleybus and the tramcar have been and gone. The horse has been retired from brougham, gig and wagon, the canals are empty of the commercial narrowboat and wherry and the trading schooner and barge are no longer seen in our coastal waters.
`Gone but not forgotten' might be the epitaph for all the mechanical ingenuity and human genius that brought about the nineteenth- and twentieth-century trans-port revolutions. Certainly the public interest in transport history is considerable and the museum world is responding to it. In the last decade many new transport museums have opened and existing ones are improving and expanding their displays.
This book describes all the museums in Great Britain and Northern Ireland whose main subject is transport and those like the Science Museum in London and the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh that have important transport collections in addition to other disciplines. It does not include railway museums which have been ex-cellently covered in the Reverend W. Awdry's guide published in 1979. Fifty-two museums each have a chapter to themselves in which their exhibits and themes are described in some detail and placed in historical context. The Gazetteer includes all one hundred and six museums with a brief description of their contents, the full address, phone number, how-to-get-there details (including rail and bus connections), opening times and an indication of parking, shop and refreshment facilities.
Written, appropriately, to appeal to 'the man on the Clapham omnibus' and his family, this guide will also be of particular value to the student, enthusiast and teacher who might wish to plan their museum visits in more detail.