National Motorcycle Museum’s knockback

Sam Hewitt

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8th December 2020

The National Motorcycle Museum application for a Heritage Lottery Fund grant – which was established by Government to “provide funding support to organisations across the heritage ecosystem that were financially sustainable before Covid-19” – has sadly been refused, with the official reason being that the application “did not meet the criteria for the programme, and the board has decided not to award a grant through the Culture Recovery Fund for Heritage”.

The application had been made in order to help retain all of the museum’s expert team of people, as well as to preserve the museum’s collection of British motorcycles which as you no doubt know, is the largest in the world. These are some of the things that have now been put in jeopardy.

Incidentally, the museum applied for a grant of under £1,000,000, of which 1970 were granted, and the list of those grants shows that 626 were gifted within the London area, more than three times the number of any other area, while the whole of Scotland received just two…

(Readers may be interested to see those organisations who have been considered worthy to receive some of the £1.5 billion of funding support on offer by visitingwww.artscouncil.org.uk/publication/culture-recovery-fund-data ).

The short-term reality is that the museum must now rely on their Covid-19 raffle and appeal to ensure that funds still flow towards the costs of the museum’s upkeep, with those funds raised going directly towards the reopening of the museum for a limited number of days each week sometime early in 2021.

However, the museum is still a long way short of their £500k target, and this huge setback lends even more importance to the current appeal, which includes the chance to win one of the three bikes shown above.