The cutting edge

10:40am Saturday 19th July 2008

Comments (0)   Have your say »

Steve Pratt sharpens his green credentials at “the world’s only lawnmower museum”.

PAUL O’Grady’s is covered in leopard skin and tied with a pink bow. Hilda Ogden’s is an ordinary domestic model, but you can sit on Prince Charles’s.

We’re talking lawnmowers. Not making cutting remarks, but gazing lovingly at these pieces of essential garden machinery. Rooms of them – big, small, water-cooled, robotic, electric, the six millioneth Concorde off the production line and laser ones guided by satellite.

The British Lawnmower Musuem – apparently the only lawnmower museum in the world – is a haven for those who follow the saying that “when the growing gets tough, the tough get mowing”.

When he invented the lawnmower in 1830, based on a machine designed to trim the nap from cloth, Edwin Budding was regarded as a madman.

His cylinder machine hasn’t changed in principle, remaining the traditional mower used on formal lawns throughout Britain.

Most other countries have moved on to the more recently introduced – around 1930 – rotary grass cutter.

Follow the road out of the centre of Southport to the Discount Mower Warehouse, an ordinary looking shop that downstairs displays new models along with sales and spares. Pay £2, pass through the turnstile and climb the stairs and you find yourself in a different world. There are lawnmowers of all shapes and sizes everywhere you look.

This museum won’t win any prizes for display or presentation.

The desire to show everything lends it an overcrowded, haphazard look. An audio commentary guides you through the history of garden machinery, pointing out some of the mowers of the rich and famous on show.

They’ve been donated. Many of the mowers have been rescued from the scrapyard and lovingly restored, thanks to the mowermad man behind this unique museum – former racing champion Brian Radam. His interest developed from his involvement in the family business that’s developed into the a Discout Garden Machinery Warehouse.

There are names from lawnmower history – the petrol-powered Red Baron, the Royal Enfield 14ins, the Super 12 hand lawnmower, the 8ins Greens silent cutter, the first electric mower from 1926 and a 24ins model the size of a small house. Sometimes it sounds more like a list of weapons than garden machinery.

You wonder about the effectivness of the automatic robot lawnmower from Sweden that requires sunlight to work. But then how many people do you know who cut their grass at night?

Celebrity and royal mowers – the one donated by Prince Charles was given to him and Diana as a wedding present by the manufacturers – help draw the non-mower crazy into the museum. That and the curator’s love of grass-cutting word play (“it’s mower interesting”) and his appeal not to let the grass grow under your feet.

■ The British Lawnmower Museum is in Shakespeare Street, Southport (01704-501336) More information at www.lawnmowerworld.com ■ For more information on Southport see www.visitsouthport.com