Club’s £7.5k boost to Rootes archive

The Sunbeam Talbot Alpine Register has donated £7500 to the Rootes Archive Centre Trust (RACT) to aid the purchase of the trust’s new archive building.

Donations for the appeal have now exceeded £100k, though a further £80k is needed to buy the building in Banbury, Oxfordshire.

The trust houses the Rootes Engineering Department drawings, plus manuals, handbooks and memorabilia.

Established in 2004 by the Association of Rootes Car Clubs, the archive has helped with the reproduction of discontinued Rootes parts and continues to catalogue the thousands of technical drawings the trust took on from Peugeot.

Increasing rental prices had threatened the archive, but the purchase of permanent premises, set to open in 2018, will guarantee the volunteer-run archive’s future.

Treasurer, Matt Ollman, says: ‘Our options were to mothball the collection in shipping containers, or close up in a few years. Now, the archive is secured for posterity.’ ❚ rootesarchivecentre.org.uk

The centre will also be available for committee meetings for rootes and other car clubs.