Mum and Dad lived on a quiet lane in the village of Holt, Wiltshire, England, in a bungalow they designed and built in the early nineties specifically to accommodate his love of engineering and two wheels. From the outside, it looked like a typical home, but step inside and you discovered a house with a reinforced loft, a well-equipped workshop, and a bike lift—all built around the rhythm of my father’s enduring obsession with motorcycles.
“Not only did he get enthused with motorbikes,” Mum laughs, “he also got infused with traction engines.” I said to him, “I’m not going to have you going out in a shed every night and coming in and putting your cold feet on my body when you go to bed. So, I insisted that we had a workshop in the house.”
From the street, the large doors to an internal garage dominate the façade of the bungalow. Behind the motorhome is a large doorway that leads to a workshop filled with an array of engineering equipment. To the side of the workshop is a bike lift, which allows bikes to be hoisted up to a reinforced open-plan loft. Inside, behind the modest living room where Mum sits beside the Christmas tree reading a magazine, is a tiny kitchen, a bathroom you could not swing a cat in, and two bedrooms. Every inch of this house is designed to support Dad’s passion, which started nearly half a century ago.
“I think the first one arrived when you were just in arms. Baby Gary,” Mum recalls. Over the decades, the collection swelled to more than forty machines — AJS, BSA Bantams, Francis-Barnetts, Triumphs, and even a White Helmets display team motorcycle. Mum says, “When we sold the old telephone exchange and lost that storage space, we decided to build a home where motorcycles would never again be an afterthought”.
Builders reinforced the loft and installed a block-and-tackle system, allowing bikes to be hoisted upstairs. “I had a special floor put in the loft that could hold a motorcycle in every six-by-four area,” Dad explains. “In effect, we could hold fifty motorbikes up here. But we had a few cash problems, and I’m getting too old to keep humping all these machines around, so now we’re getting down in numbers. The figures are now twenty-eight, and when these bikes go over to America, it’ll be down to twenty-one.”
We move between an array of impressive machinery. “This is my workshop,” Dad says, showing off the space where he has spent countless hours. “Marion said to me, if we get a bungalow, you’re going to have a room in the bungalow because you get frozen out in that shed every night, and it took till midnight to warm me up.” He moves easily among the machinery he’s collected: the EH Thompson milling machine he admired while working at Avon Rubber Company, the Myford lathe he bought for us kids when we were teenagers, a Harrison lathe salvaged from Bath University for £20, a folder-guillotine, and a small pillar drill. “I’m not a very good turner, but I manage,” he jokes, gesturing to the cluttered bench where a re-bored cylinder barrel and new piston wait to be fitted to a 172 Super Sports Francis Barnett.
In the loft, space is at a premium. Cables hang neatly along the tubing that holds the block and tackle, brake, and throttle wires, waiting for the next restoration. Bikes rest nose to tail, some stripped to frames, others freshly painted — a 1951 BSA Bantam, a 1956 Talisman Twin, an Ariel Arrow, a 3T Triumph twin, a White Helmets machine, and a 1929 Francis Barnett Model 9 two-stroke. “Basically, this is just a big garage up here,” Dad says with a grin.
What began as a single motorbike purchase in the early sixties to take him back and forth to work has become a way of life. Mum admits she has said, “No more bikes!” more times than she can count, only to watch the numbers climb again. Yet it was her insistence on a warm, integrated workshop that gave Dad a place to channel his passion into restoration rather than just storage. Even now, with the collection pared down to twenty-eight machines and plans to reduce it further, the house on Bradley Lane feels like a living museum of British motorcycling — a testament to one man’s engineering skill, his wife’s pragmatism, and a shared decision to make room, quite literally, for a lifelong love of two wheels.
Mike shows me around their house at Christmas 2007.