Continuing from my previous blog post Sunset OR Light Pollution.
Once I had decided that I wanted to continue with my Spirit Of Brooklands project, I then had to work out how to gain access. Now most of it is publicly accessible, but the land obviously belongs to someone, and if I wanted to publish the resulting photos, then I would need consent from the landowner.
Fortunately there is a museum on the site of the old track, and I arranged a meeting with them as I assumed that they would own what was left. However it transpires that the land is owned by about 20 different companies, each owning different sections. Getting permission would involve a huge amount of research. However, fortune was smiling on me.
James May (yes, he of Top Gear fame) had a television program called Toy Stories, in which he took old notable toys and created big modern projects out of them.
One such toy was the electric motor car racing game, Scalextric, which consists of pieces of track with two electrified grooves in them, which can be joined together to form a motor racing circuit. Can you see where this is going? Yes, his team built a motor racing circuit all the way round the old Brooklands motor racing circuit. The total length of which was 2.95 miles, a Guinness World Record! They then staged a race between a team of Scalextric enthusiasts (or nerds as he called them) and a team of local residents, around the entire length of the track, which actually involved closing some of the public roads that now intersect the track.
Anyway I digress, the upshot of this is that the Toy Stories production team needed to gain landowner permission to do this, and luckily for me had given the list to Brooklands Museum, who then shared it with me.
A significant proportion of the land is owned by Mercedes Benz World so I started there, and they were very amenable to giving consent. My project was up and running!
The original Brooklands track was made from 6 inch concrete, which you can see in this photo where the surface has broken into sections. I can’t imagine how uncomfortable racing round this track must have been, with the type of suspension and tyres used back in the early 20th century!
This shot shows part of the Byfleet Banking, which is a long banked piece of the race track. The banking was originally made to allow cars to drive in excess of 100mph. The part shown here is by an industrial estate and had been cleared to allow vehicles to turn when exiting and entering one of the units.
Although this concrete is breaking up, it has been down since 1907, and has had no real maintenance since the race track was closed at the start of World War II. It is actually in remarkably good condition, and if you use an aerial map and search for Brooklands, you can still see the outline of the track quite clearly, as well as the air strip that was there.
I will continue adding more stories about the series throughout the year, so stay tuned for more.
:DK
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