Avro Museum's £10M Makeover to Reveal Six Secret Vintage Warplanes!

The Avro Heritage Museum in Stockport, Greater Manchester, is planning a major expansion that will allow it to display even more of its impressive collection of vintage aircraft. The museum, which opened in 2015, is located on the site of the former BAE Systems factory in Woodford, a place where military planes were built for nearly ninety years. Inside, visitors can already see a variety of famous aircraft, including a replica of the legendary Lancaster bomber and a full-scale model of the Avro Type F, which was the first plane in the world to have a fully enclosed cockpit. Now, the museum is preparing to reveal six more complete airplanes, which have been kept in a secret storage location. These planes range in age from as early as 1908 to as recent as 2011. Terry Barnes, the chairman of the museum, explained that the expansion is important to protect the legacy of the Avro company, which played a huge role in Manchester’s aviation industry.

The Stockport Council has approved the museum’s plan to build a large extension, which is expected to cost over ten million pounds. To make this dream a reality, the museum will launch a fundraising campaign later this year. The Avro company has a long and fascinating history. It was started by aviation pioneer Alliott Verdon-Roe in 1910, who began building planes in a cotton mill in Ancoats. The company made aircraft for the Royal Flying Corps during World War One and later set up a factory and airfield in Woodford in 1924. Over the years, Avro produced many important planes, such as the Anson, the Vulcan, the Nimrod spy plane, and the famous Lancaster bomber. The factory finally closed in 2011, but the museum was created to keep the memory of these achievements alive.

The new extension will be much larger than the current museum building. It will give the museum space to display more planes, including a Vulcan bomber built in 1963 and a virtual reality experience that lets visitors feel what it was like to fly on a bombing raid over Berlin. During World War Two, more than 3,000 Lancaster bombers were assembled at Woodford after being built in Chadderton and transported across Manchester. Ian Lomax, a director and trustee at the museum, said it is incredible to think that one of their Lancaster bombers flew 137 missions during the war and still survives today. The museum currently attracts about 13,000 visitors each year, but with the new extension, they hope to increase that number to 20,000. Many of the planes that will be displayed were once shown at Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry, including the Avro Shackleton AEW Mark 2, a long-range patrol aircraft made in 1954, and the Avro 707C, a prototype used to test the delta wing design later used on the Vulcan bomber and Concorde. The museum’s expansion will help share the story of these remarkable planes with even more people.