Brooklands was the world’s first purpose-built racing circuit, built in 1907 because a 20mph speed limit was strangling British cars
Brooklands Bar sits high up in a grand Knightsbridge hotel, with ninety-two reviews and a 4.2, and it is named after one of the most important and least-remembered sites in the history of the motor car: the world’s first purpose-built racing circuit.
The speed limit problem
Here is why Brooklands was built, and it is a genuinely strange origin. In the early 1900s, Britain had a blanket speed limit of 20 miles per hour on all public roads. At the same time, the motor car was the great new technology of the age, and nearly half the world’s new cars were being made in France.
British car makers had a problem: they could not test their cars at high speed anywhere, because it was illegal to drive fast on any road in the country. The infant British motor industry was being strangled by its own speed limit, falling behind the French, with nowhere to develop or prove fast cars.
So a wealthy enthusiast named Hugh Locke King solved the problem privately. He built, on his own land in Surrey, at his own vast expense, a dedicated high-speed track where cars could be driven flat out, legally, for as long as anyone liked. It opened in 1907, and it was the first purpose-built motor racing circuit anywhere in the world.
The banking
Brooklands was extraordinary. To let the primitive, narrow-tyred cars take the curves at speed, it was built with enormous banked corners – concrete walls nearly thirty feet high, angled steeply, around which the cars could barrel without slowing. Photographs from the period show cars fully airborne at top speed, launched off the settling, shifting concrete.
It hosted the first British Grand Prix. It set countless speed records. Its motto was gloriously of its era: “the right crowd and no crowding.” It was, for the first half of the twentieth century, the centre of British motor sport – the direct ancestor of Formula One – and a place of genuine glamour and genuine danger, with no seatbelts, no safety cells, and thirty-foot concrete walls.
From racing to war
And then, in the centre of the circuit, they built an airfield – one of Britain’s first – and around it grew aircraft factories. By 1918, Brooklands was Britain’s largest aircraft manufacturing centre. When war came in 1939, the racing stopped forever, and the site turned entirely to war production, building Wellington bombers and Hurricane fighters. It was bombed by the Luftwaffe in 1940, in an attack that killed dozens.
The racing never resumed. The banking still stands, crumbling, in Surrey, now a museum – a monument to the moment Britain built a private track to escape its own speed limit, and accidentally created motor racing.
The bar
A smart hotel bar with a motoring theme, doing a fair 4.2 across a modest sample. It trades on the glamour of early motor sport – speed, engineering, the golden age of racing – and does so in one of London’s grandest hotels.
Verdict
Glamorous, well-themed, and named after the track that Britain built to dodge its own speed limit and ended up inventing motor racing.
Order a drink, and raise it to Hugh Locke King, who spent a fortune building a racetrack so that British cars could finally, legally, go fast.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Somewhere someone’s reading this at work recognizing their exact job, their exact futility, their exact despair.