Detail srazu - Pride Of Longbridge 2010

The Pride of Longbridge, 17th April 2010

This year’s Pride of Longbridge will take place in Cofton Park Longbridge on Saturday the 17th of April from 9.30am until 4pm. This is the nearest Saturday to the date on which the majority of the Longbridge workforce was made redundant five years ago.

Wholly organised by the Austin Federation, this year’s event uses a slightly different format than in previous years. In this the Austin Federation acknowledges with thanks the financial support of the Longbridge and Northfield Wards of Birmingham City Council.

There will be no large convoy to the event. However, if participants wish to meet friends and travel to Cofton Park together the Avoncroft Museum (B60 4JR) and coffee shop will be open from 9.00AM to serve as a brief gathering point and refreshment stop before participants travel on to Cofton Park by a very attractive route. Austin Federation marshals will be on hand with a route map from Avoncroft Museum to Cofton Park until 10.30AM. Avoncroft Museum cannot provide space for people to wait for a long period of time for others to join them.

All vehicles with a Longbridge connection are welcome, from Austin 7s to Rover 75s, MGFs to Austin Devons, MGBs to Vanden Plas Princess Limousines. Famous makes likely to be involved include, Vanden Plas, Morris, Wolseley, Riley, Honda and MG, as well as the core Longbridge brand of Austin.

Please join us in Cofton Park, opposite the Longbridge plant, to mark the fifth anniversary of the closure of MG Rover.

Longbridge closed abruptly in 2005, making a whole community redundant. Since then the Longbridge area has gone through enormous change, with workers retraining and much of the area being redeveloped for a new future in modern industries and education. The plant is producing cars again, albeit on a much smaller scale, but the community as whole remains both optimistic and proud of the century of innovation and mobilisation ‘The Austin’ (as locals will often call it) fathered between 1905 and 2005. No other UK plant is as significant to British and world motor industry history and no other car maker produced iconic egalitarian cars that motorised the masses and revolutionised the very idea of what a car could be, twice, in 1922 and 1959.

The Pride of Longbridge rally is a celebration of those great achievements and a chance for the community to gather in Cofton park alongside the plant and enjoy the vehicles they and their ancestors created.

Please come and join us if you have a vehicle with a Longbridge connection (remember the factory built engines for cars as diverse as MGBs and Jensen 541s) and be part of an event that is as much a pilgrimage as a car rally.

Or just come and enjoy the range of vehicles attending, Cofton Park is a public space and will remain so on the day of the event, something which helps give Pride of Longbridge its unique community feel.

Contact Details -austinfederation@btinternet.com

http://www.avoncroft.org.uk/

Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings, Stoke Heath, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, B60 4JR

Cofton Park, Low Hill lane, Longbridge, B31 2BQ Birmingham.

Just heard there will be NO convoy this year, so straight to Cofton Park this year for 9.30am