Lakeland Motor Museum Review
Lakeland Motor Museum
Ulverston, Cumbria
Reviewed by Cathy Porteus
The Lakeland Motor Museum in Cumbria is absolutely packed with interesting items. In addition to the cars, motorbikes and bicycles, there are a huge selection of car themed artefacts. On the ground floor, there are old fashioned shop windows, which I was interested to look at. My favourite was one with 60s themed clothing and music. There was also a toy shop with car orientated vintage toys and a shoe repairman. Upstairs there are lots of car shaped antiques and vintage motor related signs.
The main attraction though is the cars – all types and ages from an 1899 motor tricycle to a 1990 Mini Cooper. I wasn’t sure that they would be interesting to the whole family but actually we all really enjoyed looking around. My daughter was particularly interested in the world’s smallest car a 1964 Peep P50. It was fascinating to hear that there is now a company trying to remake these tiny cars, finance partly by a Dragons’ Den deal. I loved the 1966 Amphicar – a German car which turned into a boat. These were produced commercially but sadly were banned from import to the US so the company didn’t last long. There was one in the museum and a video showing how they worked in real life. We could have done with one of these to get across Lake Windermere!
Upstairs there were examples of bicycles from the penny farthing to modern bikes, there was even a 5 wheeled penta-cycle, apparently trialled for postage delivery in the past. My children loved the selection of vintage games machines. These precursors to the modern video games allowed the children to race each other by turning handles. The machines needed 10p or 20p to play but were well worth it, although there was 1 machine that took my 20p and then didn’t work.
The final area that we visited was the Bluebird exhibition, which was in a separate building. This chronicled the progress of Donald and Malcolm Campbell, who set 21 land and water speed records between them, including some on lakes in the local area.
I would recommend the quiz to all young visitors to the museum. My children thought it was excellent and it certainly kept them busy. The questions guide you through the exhibits and to answer them correctly you need to read the printed information. Both of my children were able to find the answers themselves and I thought it was well pitched – easy enough to be do-able without too much parental involvement but also difficult enough to be challenging. When you’ve completed the quiz, you are then given a medal by the staff member in the shop. The answers are available on their website, so can be checked afterwards.
There is a café at the museum with tables inside and outside overlooking the river. We didn’t visit the café on our visit but it looked to have a good selection of tasty food with lots of visitors enjoying their meals.
We combined a visit to the motor museum with a boat trip on Lake Windermere. The combined museum and boat tickets represent a good saving, so buying this way is a good idea. A minibus is available to take visitors from the boat landing to the museum. I would definitely recommend using this as it seemed a fair distance to walk. Alternatively, there is plenty of free parking available at the museum itself. We thought that the time between the boats’ departures (about 1.5 hours) was exactly right to get the best out of the museum without getting too tired, but if you were visiting the café too, then a longer visit would be ideal.
On the whole, I thought the museum was more interesting than I expected and a bit different from other similar attractions. It was rather cluttered perhaps and this meant at points it was too much to take in, there was hardly any wall or floor space free as everywhere was covered with different collections and exhibits. This was our only criticism though and I would recommend the Motor Museum to anyone who was in the area.
Rating: 4/5
Tickets start from £5 (click here for latest ticket prices).
For more information or to book tickets visit www.lakelandmotormuseum.co.uk.
Lakeland Motor Museum, Old Blue Mill, Backbarrow, Ulverston, Cumbria, LA12 8TA
