McLaren Mercedes F1 car in the National Motor Museum

Our Vision For Motoring Into The Future

Chief Executive of the National Motor Museum, Dr Jon Murden discusses our vision for the future and the masterplan for the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu.

Successful museums cannot stand still, and visitor expectations must be exceeded if museums are to survive and grow. The National Motor Museum is no exception, and since the beginning of 2024 we have been working with architects and project consultants to evaluate our buildings, collections and displays, creating a masterplan for our future development. As a result, we are now planning the most fundamental changes to the National Motor Museum since 1972. These will transform the ways we look after, use, display and interpret our collections, and the stories we tell, all with the goal of making us attractive to successive generations of visitors, making us more sustainable and ensuring our continued economic viability.

This plan delivers improvements over two phases:

Phase One 2024-2025: Ages of Motoring

This will completely redisplay the upper ground floor of the Museum, creating a new welcome/orientation space and re-interpreting the galleries with a cohesive and contextualized approach to storytelling. This will include a free flowing and harmonized display space, threaded through with an entertaining and engaging narrative about the overarching story of motoring from its earliest times to the present day.

Over £500,000 of external funding has already been secured towards the delivery of this £900,000 project, construction of which we hope will be completed by the end of 2025.

Phase Two 2026-2030: Motoring Into the Future

This ambitious project would transform the remaining spaces of the National Motor Museum, including the presently underutilized lower ground floor, and open-up public access to the stored objects within the Collections Centre.

The five major strands of the project are:

The creation of an open access vehicle store (‘the Vault’) allowing us to redesign displays across the Museum and enabling future collecting, and the establishment of a purpose designed temporary exhibition gallery to enable more ambitious and impactful public programming.
Locating a new education / conference space for schools, colleges, and the wider community in the Museum building – set within sight and sound of the vehicle collection as an inspirational, engaging space for learning
Reimagining the collections centre as the Motoring Heritage Hub. This will safeguard our collections for future generations and give unprecedented visitor access to our previously hidden objects, art, photographs, libraries, archives, and behind the scenes conservation, digitization, documentation and collections work.
Establishing the Heritage Vehicle Centre of Excellence which includes a new museum workshop and BEaM – Beaulieu Engineering and Maintenance Centre: an apprenticeship and training facility to be established in partnership with the Heritage Skills Academy.

Altogether, this work will cost an estimated £23 million between now and the end of the decade. Initial, encouraging conversations with the National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF), other funders and key stakeholders have already taken place this autumn – and we will all be doing everything within our power to make these ambitions a reality. This will continue with making a full application to the NLHF in the first half of 2025 and I will keep you posted on how this is developing over the coming months.