Being an American living in the UK, I took the first week of July off work for FREEDOM™ reasons. It seemed like a good time to take a day trip and go to a few museums I had been meaning to visit.

On the way, I had breakfast in a cafe in Kettering that offered french fries for breakfast. America should adopt this.

The Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust is split between two locations. The first is the British Motor Museum, which is in Gaydon next to Jaguar Land Rover headquarters and test track, and Aston Martin headquarters.


Outside the British Motor Museum

BMM tickets are £16 and valid for a year. I thought the admission was well worth it. The museum had a lot of interesting things and was well laid out, but I found the peripherals frustrating. On entering, I followed what seemed like a natural lane into the parking lot only to get stuck at a dead end on a one lane road. Not just me, either, I saw it happen to three other people. All the staff, whenever they saw you, seemed to go into the exact same full length welcome spiel. The museum is spread across two buildings, and they don't have the same opening hours.

Still, there was a lot of cool stuff. Nothing is roped off so you can get up close.





lawnmower from 1896

the gift shop only had white XKs

Sir William Lyons, founder of Jaguar, liked green so much he had this dress made for his wife.

X100 used in a James Bond movie

The X150 concept car, and disappointingly the only X150 on display.

This XJ8 isn't chrome or a wrap, it's polished aluminum.

After BMM, I took a drive around to see what could be seen of the JLR campus and Aston Martin. The security guys didn't seem friendly, though, so all I ended up with was this one pic.



After that, I headed for the other half of the Heritage Trust which is located in the Coventry Transport Museum.

CTM tickets are £15 and are also valid for a year. The museum is more a mixed bag than BMM, with cars, bicycles, and motorcycles. It runs more of a timeline from pre-WWI up to today. There is more for kids to do, though my unscientific count indicates fewer cars overall than BMM.


crazy story

F-Type shell on display in the technology section

Three of the fastest cars in the world: Thrust2, Bloodhound LSR, and Thrust SSC. The latter is the current world land speed record holder at 763 mph, the only land vehicle to date to break the sound barrier.

The museum points out to American tourists that Coventry was the headquarters of several major auto manufacturers, and so is like the Detroit of the UK. Aside from the cars and bikes on display in the museum, the gift shop sells skateboards. I also noticed the gift shop had a lot of the same candies for sale as BMM, though in different packaging.

To wrap up the day, I had thought about going to the racetrack at Silverstone to see their museum, but they are bafflingly closed during races, and the British Grand Prix was this weekend. I looked at getting tickets, but they were £159 just to watch practice.

Instead, I headed for one more museum, though it had nothing to do with Jaguar (Land Rover, though).

In the town of Husbands Bosworth is the Armourgeddon military museum and tank driving experience. For £210, they'll let you drive a FV432 armored personnel carrier for an hour. Unfortunately, the tickets were sold out when I arrived, but for £9 I visited the museum.

The road was horrible. With all the heavy equipment on-site you would think they could grade it.



I got the sense that this museum is someone's personal project. It seems a bit improvised, and I noticed a few of the captions had spelling errors. Still, they have an impressive collection of weapons, uniforms, and vehicles.





Parting shot - this car is the bomb!