Walk Among Three Centuries of Garden Machinery
You step into a Southport warehouse and find yourself surrounded by over 300 restored lawnmowers and pieces of garden machinery spanning the last 200 years. This is the British Lawnmower Museum, where Brian Radam—an ex-racing champion whose family business, Lawnmowerworld, has sold and serviced garden equipment since 1945—has assembled something far stranger and more compelling than its name suggests. The collection reaches back to patents and blueprints from 1799, and includes machines built by manufacturers you would never expect to make grass-cutting equipment: Rolls Royce, Royal Enfield, Vincent motorcycles, Dennis, Hawker Sidley, Perkins Diesel, British Leyland, and Fraser Nash. Walk the rows and you are tracing not just horticultural history but industrial design, engineering ambition, and the odd whims of British manufacturing.
Lawnmowers Owned by the Famous, and Unexpected Manufacturers
The museum's "Lawnmowers of the Rich and Famous" section holds machines once owned by Prince Charles and Princess Diana, guitarist Brian May, performer and presenter Paul O'Grady, comedian Lee Mack, and Jean Alexander, who lived in Southport for many years and starred in Coronation Street. Lee Mack, a Southport native, famously appeared on the panel show Would I Lie to You? in 2012 and claimed he had donated a dibber to the museum—a claim verified as true, and the dibber remains on display. The unexpected presence of aviation and automotive manufacturers reflects a deeper story: before the lawn became a domestic obsession, the technology to maintain it was treated as serious engineering. You will see solar-powered mowing robots alongside hand-pushed Victorian machines, and the design logic of each era laid bare.
Guided Tours and Restoration Work
The museum offers guided tours that walk you through the collection and its history. Behind the scenes, Radam's workshops restore lawnmowers for the museum's own collection and for clients around the world—work that has made the museum recognized internationally as one of the world's leading authorities on vintage lawnmowers. The museum also hires out vintage machines as film and television props, a reminder that this place is both a serious conservation effort and a working business. If you have a specific machine you want to understand or value, the museum offers valuation services and access to its archives of manuscripts and historical documents.
Spend an Afternoon, or Linger Over Details
Plan to spend at least a couple of hours wandering the collection—longer if you are interested in the engineering or the social history of lawn care. There is no crowding; visitors tend to move at their own pace. The museum benefits from being visited on a weekday if you prefer quiet exploration. The lawnmower story itself is worth knowing: Edwin Beard Budding patented the machine in 1830 while working at a textile mill in Stroud, Gloucester, where he designed it to trim the nap on cloth before recognizing its use for grass. Budding was so uncertain of public acceptance that he tested the machine at night to avoid ridicule. That hesitation vanished; the lawn became one of the defining obsessions of the British suburb. Standing here, surrounded by the machines that made this possible, you understand why.
Nearby in Southport
Southport itself is worth a day's exploration. Walk Southport Pier, a mile-long Victorian structure reaching into the Irish Sea, renovated between 2017 and 2019, with a café and views at its end. If you have time, visit the old village to the north, where there are pubs and places to eat. Southport Pleasureland is an amusement park within the town. For a wider range of interests, the town sits near Ainsdale Sand Dunes National Nature Reserve, Meols Hall (a manor house mostly rebuilt in the 1960s but with medieval origins), and the Southport Model Railway Village. The West Lancashire Light Railway, a short drive north, operates a two-foot gauge railway with vintage industrial locomotives on weekends from April to October. Holy Trinity, Saint Teresa Catholic Church, St John's, and St Peters Church are dotted through town if you are interested in local architecture.
Begin planning your visit by contacting the museum directly. It is not a grand institution with heavy crowds, but a working museum run by someone with genuine expertise and a collector's passion. That combination makes it worth the trip to Southport.