Aston Martin Heritage Trust causes fury by scrapping plans to build a world-class museum in Milton Keynes town

For years the Aston Martin Heritage Trust (AMHT) has planning with aplomb to build a multi-million pound museum in Newport Pagnell, the town where the cars were made for decades, complete with a James Bond theme.

The Trust won permission three years ago to lease the land for free from the city council and persuaded the town council to welcome them with open arms – even though the London Road site had housed well-established allotments for years.

The allotment holders were moved off and the town has been preparing excitedly ever since for the deluge of tourists and business that such a major attraction would bring.

The city council even threw in a package of extra land it owns at Lovat Meadow, again gifting it for free so Aston Martin could use it as a museum car park.

But this month the bombshell came that AMHT were pulling out of the entire generous deal at the eleventh hour.

No explanation for the U-turn has been made public and the Citizen is awaiting a response from the trust, which is a registered charity formed orginally by the Aston Martin owners’ club.

A spokesperson from Newport Pagnell Town Council said today (Monday): “Despite years of efforts on our part to support the initiative, we have very recently had confirmation that the AMHT,has decided it cannot progress with the proposal to build an Aston Martin Heritage Centre on the London Road site which belongs to the Town Council.

"The Town Council is extremely disappointed and annoyed at this response, as we had anticipated that this development would be a significant boost to our local economy, and we had invested a huge amount of work in removing every barrier in the way of it coming forward.”

Town councillors are now considering what other purposes the site could be used for.

"As the Town Council is the main provider of leisure, including open space such as Riverside Meadow, it is most likely this will be for some sort of sporting or leisure use,” said the spokesperson.

They added: “ We would love to hear from townsfolk about your thoughts on the site.”

However, it is “unlikely” that the London Road site would be returned to allotments, they said.

“It was never truly suitable for that purpose. Part of the site flooded every year, and owing to a streak of Kaolin running through the clay, some of the allotments were not easy to work,” explained the spokesperon.

" At the time of closure, the site was only half full, so a new allotment site was opened in Burgess Gardens, which is where there was more need for allotments... The demand for allotments is already being met by the current provision.”

Newport Pagnell is famous as the home of Aston Martin and the cars were produced there for more than 50 years by a skilled workforce of local people. The Aston Martin Works Service Department is still based in Tickford Street today.

MK City Council agreed to grant the lease of the land for free to AMHT, which said it had outgrown its current premises in a village near Oxford.

The Trust’s business plan at the time stated: “The Aston Martin Museum will provide not only a hub for the history of Aston Martin, but will support learning through local schools, and engineering apprenticeships provided by Cranfield University.”

It added: "The museum will focus resources on continuing links and collaborations with local education establishments - schools, university and college, and these will be rolled out as set out in the business plan... It will have classroom and lecture rooms to deliver its charitable objective for the advancement of education study and research.”

One of the biggest social benefits derived from the museum would be from offering an "exciting and inspiring" visitor attraction, particularly with the James Bond gallery, promised the plan.