How Bicester Heritage will become a UK motoring haven

“We never imagined we’d find a place as large or as perfectly sited,” he says, “especially given that it’s within minutes of Bicester’s other famous attraction, the Shopping Village. After three years our site was off the at-risk list, and quite soon Historic England was citing us a national exemplar of constructive conservation. That’s something we’re very proud of.” 

Most of Bicester’s original buildings were erected in eye-catching red brick at a time when the revered architect Sir Edwin Lutyens – who loved such buildings – was a member of the council that oversaw such public work. When they studied them, Geoghegan and his team discovered the buildings were fundamentally sound, though there were early problems with graffiti, broken windows and fire damage. The new owners have worked systematically to restore buildings and convert some to modern purposes. Drop in at Bicester now, as we recently did, and your impression is of well-ordered, slightly old-school serenity.

It takes a tour of the whole site, preferably as a passenger to Geoghegan in his trusty long-wheelbase Land Rover or lissom 1920s Alvis two-seater, to appreciate the awesome scale of it and the size of its potential effect on motoring’s future. It is suddenly easy to understand Bicester Motion’s plan to bring 2000 new jobs to the area and to help populate the thousands of new-build homes already planned for the area. 

Bicester’s most prominent buildings, visible from both entrance gate and airfield apron, are four large 1920s hangars built on the edge of the grass Flying Field. These will be preserved more or less as they are, fronted by a wide ‘fast driving’ perimeter track called The Radial. The hangars will be converted internally to events and exhibition spaces capable of housing up to 2000 people. Back in the 1920s, six hangars were planned but only four were built, so Geoghegan plans two more in the same architectural style, using one as a 344-room hotel. 

Follow the perimeter drive in an anticlockwise direction from the hangar apron and you soon reach a clutch of buildings planned as a Centre of Excellence for Historic Motoring, the all-new FAST technology hub, then several rows of blast-proof bomb stores due to be converted into mews garages with accommodation, some of them beside a lake in the site’s bottom corner. 

Keep turning left – the perimeter is a four-mile drive – and you’ll come to 100 acres of country park shown on the map as Bicester Reserve, beyond which there is space for 4x4 driving tracks and a new-build brand experience centre, intended for product launches and fronted by its own network of demonstration tracks. Much of this has yet to be built, though planning work is well advanced. Work will necessarily proceed in stages, but a new collection of outline approvals is expected later this year. The site’s relative protection from new residential areas, and its already-proven ability to handle big events, is helping with planning decisions, Geoghegan believes.