The best way to understand a historic transport vehicle is to experience it in motion. And the only sure way to know that it’s complete is to turn the key or crank the handle and drive it. But the skills and knowledge needed to maintain and operate heritage commercial vehicles, such as London buses, are currently at risk of being lost.  

Funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund, our Sustaining Heritage Skills project is exploring and testing ways to retain these engineering skills. They are an important part of our industrial heritage and essential for looking after our collections. 

The technology used in many heritage vehicles is now obsolete, and those working in the transport industry today are not taught the skills needed to maintain these older and historic vehicles. Those who do have the skills are growing older.  

This isn’t just a challenge for the museum sector. Our research shows that other organisations, such as in the lucrative classic car sector, find it hard to recruit younger people with these skills. While some large organisations currently have the skills they need, no one is confident about the future. 

Bringing together volunteers, staff, and contractors from across the commercial and heritage sectors, our Sustaining Heritage Skills project will help us understand how to create an environment which will allow scarce skills to be shared. It will explore how innovation in volunteering, greater transparency and collaboration can incentivise and enable the people who hold these skills to train the next generation.  

Project activities will include:  

• Delivering weekend volunteering opportunities for people of working age; 

• Testing new ways of recruiting skilled volunteers, such as taking heritage buses to working depots; 

• Research into a shared register of vehicle restoration projects; 

• Research towards a directory of skills and contractors to understand how at-risk each skill is; 

• Discovering if it is possible to match skills and vehicle restoration needs.