About
The National Cycle Museum occupies the Automobile Palace, a striking former motor showroom on Temple Street in Llandrindod Wells built in 1906 by bicycle-shop owner Tom Norton for his expanding motor and cycle business. The building's grand, purpose-built showroom character makes it an unusually fitting home for a museum devoted entirely to the two-wheeled machine that predates the motor car it once sold.
The museum's collection traces its own convoluted history back to 1979, when collector Ray Fixter opened the Belton Cycle Museum near Grantham. After Fixter's death in 1983 the collection moved to Lincoln, operating there as the National Cycle Museum from 1984 until closing in 1996. In 1997 the Welsh Tourist Board saw an opportunity to combine three separate collections — the National Cycle Museum, the Tom Norton collection, and a further collection assembled by David Higman — under one roof in Llandrindod Wells, reopening the Automobile Palace on 21 March 1997 as the home it occupies today.
The result is one of the most complete cycling collections in Britain, with more than 260 bicycles spanning over two centuries, from an 1818 wooden hobby-horse — effectively the ancestor of the modern bicycle, propelled by pushing feet against the ground rather than pedalling — through the high-wheeled penny-farthings of the Victorian cycling boom and early solid-tyred 'safety bicycles' that replaced them, up to contemporary carbon-fibre racing machines. Alongside the bicycles themselves, the museum displays a substantial archive of cycling books, badges, trophies, photographs and accessories documenting how cycling evolved from a wealthy hobbyist's novelty into mass transport, sport and, eventually, a byword for healthy, low-carbon travel.
Run on a small scale by volunteers and open only on limited days, the National Cycle Museum rewards visitors with a genuinely specialist, uncrowded look at an aspect of transport history that larger transport museums typically cover only briefly, set within a distinctive Edwardian building that is itself part of the story of how cycles and motor cars shared showroom space in the early twentieth century.
Categories:
Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
💡 Visitor Tips
- Check the museum's opening days carefully before travelling — it opens only Monday, Tuesday and Saturday, April to October.
- The visit is compact; combine it with a wider look around Llandrindod Wells, a well-preserved Victorian spa town.
- Bring cash as a small independent volunteer-run museum may have limited card payment options.
- Contact ahead if you have specific accessibility needs, as the historic building has some level changes.
- Cycling enthusiasts should allow extra time to talk to the volunteer staff, who are often knowledgeable collectors themselves.
- The building's Edwardian showroom architecture is worth appreciating in its own right, not just the bicycles inside it.
- Out-of-season visitors should contact the museum in advance, as it may be possible to arrange a special opening.
- Combine with the nearby Radnorshire Museum for a fuller day of Llandrindod Wells heritage.
Highlights
The 1818 Hobby-Horse
The museum's earliest exhibit is an 1818 hobby-horse, sometimes called a dandy horse or draisine, which represents the true ancestor of the modern bicycle.
Lacking pedals entirely, riders propelled themselves by pushing their feet directly against the ground while balancing and steering the wooden frame, a design that seems almost comically primitive today but which introduced the fundamental idea of a two-wheeled, rider-balanced vehicle for the first time.
Seeing this machine alongside the museum's carbon-fibre modern racing bicycles, displayed within the same building, makes vivid just how far cycle design has travelled across almost exactly two centuries — the full span the collection sets out to document.
The Penny-Farthing Collection
A substantial collection of penny-farthings, the high-wheeled bicycles that defined cycling's first great popular boom in the 1870s and 1880s, forms one of the museum's core strengths. Their large front wheel maximised speed for a given pedal revolution before gearing systems existed, at the cost of a genuinely dangerous riding position high above the ground with no effective way to brake safely on a sudden stop — a trade-off that gave the era's most enthusiastic riders a certain daredevil reputation.
The collection illustrates the variety of designs manufacturers experimented with during this period, before the safety bicycle's more familiar diamond frame made cycling accessible to a far wider, less athletically daring public.
Early Solid-Tyred Safety Bicycles
The museum's run of early 'safety bicycles' documents the pivotal shift away from the penny-farthing toward the low, chain-driven, similarly sized two-wheel design that still defines the bicycle today.
Fitted with solid rather than pneumatic tyres, these machines predate John Boyd Dunlop's air-filled tyre and offer a noticeably harder, less forgiving ride than any bicycle built since, a detail that is easy to overlook until seen up close. Their arrival in the 1880s and 1890s is widely credited with genuinely democratising cycling, opening it to women and older riders for the first time and setting the template that every subsequent bicycle, however sophisticated, has continued to follow.
The Automobile Palace Building Itself
The museum's home is almost as significant as its collection: a purpose-built 1906 motor and cycle showroom constructed for Tom Norton, a Llandrindod Wells bicycle-shop owner whose expanding business needed grander premises to display both the bicycles and the emerging motor cars he was beginning to sell.
The building's scale and showroom character, unusual for a small mid-Wales town, reflect the genuine wealth generated by the late-Victorian and Edwardian cycling boom before motoring gradually overtook it.
Its survival, and eventual reuse as a museum devoted to exactly the trade it was built to serve, gives the collection a rare sense of historical continuity between building and contents.
Collections
The National Cycle Museum holds more than 260 bicycles spanning over two centuries, from an 1818 wooden hobby-horse through Victorian penny-farthings and early solid-tyred safety bicycles to modern carbon-fibre racing machines. The collection was formed in 1997 by merging three separate holdings — the former National Cycle Museum, the personal collection of Automobile Palace builder Tom Norton, and a further collection assembled by David Higman — under the auspices of the Welsh Tourist Board.
Alongside the bicycles, the museum holds cycling books, club badges, trophies, photographs and accessories documenting the sport and pastime's social history.
The collection is displayed within the Automobile Palace itself, a purpose-built 1906 motor and cycle showroom that is a fitting historic setting for the collection it now houses.
Two Centuries of Cycling
The core chronological display running from the 1818 hobby-horse through penny-farthings and safety bicycles to modern carbon-fibre machines.
Cycling Memorabilia and Archive
Books, badges, trophies and photographs documenting the social and sporting history of cycling.
Themes
Time Periods
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.