Brooklands: Inside the World's First Purpose-Built Race Circuit
In June 1907, on low-lying farmland beside the River Wey near Weybridge in Surrey, a procession of cars rolled out onto something no one on Earth had ever seen before: a huge, banked oval of raw concrete built for one purpose only, to let motor cars run flat out. Brooklands opened two years before Indianapolis was laid down and fifteen years before Monza, which makes this quiet corner of England the birthplace of the purpose-built race circuit. Everything that followed, from superspeedways to test tracks, traces a line back to this bowl of grey concrete in the Surrey countryside.
A circuit born of frustration
To understand why Brooklands exists at all, you have to understand how hostile Edwardian Britain was to the motor car. The Motor Car Act of 1903 imposed a blanket speed limit of 20 miles per hour on public roads, and racing on the mainland's highways was simply out of the question. While France, Italy and Germany staged great city-to-city contests and closed-road races, British manufacturers had nowhere at home to prove their machines at speed. Trials had to be run abroad or on the Isle of Man, where local law allowed road closures.
Hugh Locke King, a wealthy landowner whose estate spread across the Wey valley near Weybridge, saw this as a national embarrassment. British cars were losing ground to continental rivals partly because British engineers could not test at racing speeds. His answer was breathtakingly direct: he would build a private speed course on his own land, open to manufacturers and racing men alike. What began as a plan for a relatively modest track grew, under engineering advice, into something far more ambitious, and the cost of it would consume a large part of his personal fortune.
Pouring a concrete colossus
The design brief was radical. Cars of the day could already exceed anything a flat corner could hold, so the circuit's curves were banked so steeply that a car could, in theory, take them without steering input at the right speed. The result was an outer circuit of about 2.75 miles, roughly 4.4 kilometres, built from unreinforced concrete laid over the uneven, marshy ground. The track was around 100 feet wide, and the two great curves, the Members' Banking and the Byfleet Banking, rose to nearly 30 feet at their highest point, a wall of concrete that towered over spectators below.
The engineering problems were relentless. The River Wey crossed the site, so the track had to be carried over it on a bridge, and thousands of labourers worked through 1906 and 1907 to move earth, divert water and lay the vast ribbon of concrete. The whole thing went from farmland to finished circuit in well under a year, an astonishing pace for the era. When the bills were added up, Locke King had spent a fortune measured in the hundreds of thousands of pounds of the day, and he never truly recovered it.
The first summer of speed
Brooklands opened officially in June 1907, with Locke King's wife Ethel, who had been deeply involved in rescuing the project when money and management faltered, taking a prominent role at the head of the opening procession. Within weeks the track had already proved its worth as a record venue: Selwyn Francis Edge drove a Napier single-handed for 24 hours, circulating through the night with the track edges marked by lanterns, and averaged around 65 miles per hour, a distance record that stood for years.
The first proper race meeting followed in July 1907, and it revealed how little anyone knew about running motor races. The organisers borrowed wholesale from horse racing: there was a paddock, competitors were handicapped like racehorses, and drivers were identified not by numbers but by coloured smocks, like jockeys' silks. Spectators found it nearly impossible to tell who was who, and the conventions of modern race organisation, numbers, scoreboards, structured handicapping, had to be invented at Brooklands through trial and error over the seasons that followed.
Records, badges and the Outer Circuit
Between the wars, Brooklands became the beating heart of British motorsport and a factory for speed records. The Brooklands Automobile Racing Club awarded a coveted badge to drivers who lapped the Outer Circuit at over 120 miles per hour, and membership of that informal club was one of the great distinctions in racing. In February 1913, Percy Lambert became the first person to cover more than 100 miles in a single hour, driving a Talbot; he was killed at the track later that same year attempting to reclaim his record, a reminder of how unforgiving the concrete could be.
The ultimate expression of Outer Circuit racing was the Napier-Railton, a huge machine built around an aero engine for John Cobb. In 1935 Cobb lapped Brooklands at just over 143 miles per hour, about 230 km/h, a lap record that was never beaten because the track's racing life ended before anyone could top it. The great names of British speed, Malcolm Campbell among them, were regulars here, and Brooklands was also notably open to women racers by the standards of the age, hosting women's races from its early years and producing stars such as Kay Petre. The first British Grand Prix was held on the circuit in 1926, and in 1937 a road-style course, the Campbell Circuit, was added inside the bowl to reflect how racing was changing.
Where British aviation learned to fly
Brooklands has a second, equally important identity: it is one of the birthplaces of British aviation. The wide, flat centre of the circuit made a natural flying ground, and pioneers were experimenting with powered flight there almost as soon as the concrete had set, with Alliott Verdon Roe making his early hop-flights at the track in 1908. A flying village of sheds and schools grew up inside the bowl, and Thomas Sopwith, later famous for the fighters that bore his name, learned to fly at Brooklands.
The site became a serious industrial centre. Vickers established aircraft manufacturing there, and the engineer Barnes Wallis, later celebrated for his wartime inventions, did much of his work at Brooklands. Hawker also used the aerodrome, and the prototype of the Hurricane fighter made its first flight from Brooklands in late 1935. For three decades the roar of racing engines shared the Surrey air with the drone of aircraft, an overlap of two revolutions in transport that no other place on the planet can claim in quite the same way.
The war that ended the racing
When Britain declared war in September 1939, racing at Brooklands stopped immediately, and it never came back. The site was given over entirely to aircraft production, with Vickers building Wellington bombers there in large numbers, and the once-gleaming white concrete was camouflaged with paint and netting to hide it from the air. The Luftwaffe found it anyway: a raid on the Vickers works in September 1940 caused heavy loss of life among the factory workers.
Wartime needs did permanent damage to the track itself. Sections of the banking were cut through and structures were built across the circuit to serve the factory and the airfield, and after the war the racing circuit was beyond economic repair. In 1946 the site was sold to Vickers, and Brooklands' future belonged to aviation alone, with aircraft work continuing on the site for decades afterwards.
What survives today
Brooklands was never demolished so much as absorbed, and remarkable fragments survived the twentieth century. Long stretches of the Members' Banking still stand, weathered and cracked but unmistakable, and you can walk on the same concrete that Cobb and Campbell thundered around. The Test Hill, a brutally steep gradient built in 1932 for hill-start and brake testing, survives too, along with the Edwardian clubhouse at the heart of the old paddock.
Since 1991 the Brooklands Museum has told the double story of the site, with the mighty Napier-Railton in its collection and an aircraft display that runs from the pioneers to a Concorde, a fitting bookend for a place that watched both the car and the aeroplane grow up. Standing at the top of the banking today, with the concrete curving away beneath your feet, it is still easy to imagine the noise.
Explore on the map
Brooklands is one point in a much bigger story: the worldwide network of circuits, ovals and speedways that grew from the idea first poured in Surrey concrete in 1907. On our interactive map you can find the Brooklands site itself, then trace its descendants, from Indianapolis and Monza to the modern circuits of today, and see how the geography of speed spread across the globe. Zoom in on Surrey to start where it all began.