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The National Motorcycle Museum, which houses the world’s largest collection of British motorcycles has put 90 bikes in its reserve collection up for sale to help get it through the Covid crisis.
‘It’s important for people to understand there are no gaps in the museum because of what we’re doing,’ museum director James Hewing tells Bike. ‘We’ve got a lot of reserve inventory so we can sell them off without impacting anything that customers see. We’re selling 90 of the 125 bikes in the reserve collection. ‘There are a couple ideally we wouldn’t sell such as the SS100 [a 1936 Brough Superior that has the earliest engine number of any production model]. But even that has to be put into context – we had 15 Broughs and five SS100S. It’s not like the museum won’t have an SS100 – we’ve still got three.’ James is sanguine about selling the reserve collection bikes, but is furious about the reason he’s had to do it. ‘The big story here is the kick in the teeth we had from the Government, when we didn’t get any money from the DCMS [Department for Culture, Media and Sport] with no explanation about why we didn’t get the grant we applied for. You can help the museum and its staff claw their way out of Covid hell by entering a lottery to win a Norton Commando 850 at nationalmotorcyclemuseum.co.uk. By the time Bike goes to press some of the reserve collection bikes will have been sold by Bonhams, but plenty more are for sale with H&H on 19 December. That sale also includes lots of other temptation including the Honda RC30 and Suzuki GSX-R1100 shown below.