Penguin UK - Bollocks to Alton Towers

Uncommonly British Days Out - The British Lawnmower Museum, 106-114 Shakespeare Street, Southport, Lancashire, PR8 5AJ - 01704 501336

henever the world becomes too much to take, whenever things seem difficult, annoying or confusing, millions of Britons take solace in sheds and garages, knowing that there is something mechanical in there, lying in bits, and it's not going to ask them any tricky questions.

We are a proud nation of enthusiast engineers, who regularly escape visits by unwanted in-laws to skulk at a workbench quietly inventing the computer, or designing a Mars probe or, here at the literal cutting edge of man-in-shed achievement, restoring one of the planet's biggest collections of vintage lawnmowers.

The British Lawnmower Museum in Southport is one of the purest, most British attractions in this book. As the curator will inform you, the lawnmower is a Great British Object. Other nations, with less luxuriant grass and less exacting standards of mowing, may claim to use lawnmowers, but look closely in their fiendish foreign sheds and chances are you'll find a 'grasscutter' (a name to be spat, not savoured). With their rotating, horizontal blades and crude slashing action, these upstart machines flail away at the lawn like a dervish, leaving split ends that would cause a cricket groundsman to mumble disagreeably and pull his cap down.

Britain on the other hand is the last outpost of the genuine lawnmower; a weighty beast with a sturdy roller and a meticulous cylinder action, snipping the grass with the delicacy of a hairdresser, and styling it into verdant stripes. By visiting the British Lawnmower Museum, you are truly celebrating part of our national heritage.

Stanley's Hardware, the garden shed of dreams.

Downstairs, Stanley's is a good old-fashioned British hardware shop, a family business which opened in 1945 as the area's first DIY store. But if you go up the stairs, past the waiting gnome and on to the landing, you enter lawnmower Valhalla.

At first, you may be a little bemused. We are raised to understand the thrill of an aircraft hangar full of old Spitfires, or a restored locomotive, but you may not know how to react to a building full of old lawnmowers. The correct answer is with awe…There are steam mowers, electric mowers, petrol mowers, hover mowers, racing mowers and toy mowers. There are mowers built by firms more used to making limousines (Rolls-Royce), jump jets (Hawker-Siddeley) or fire engines (Dennis). There are steel leviathans and tiny plastic prototypes, steam mowers and models designed to be drawn by elephants. There's even a two-inch wide mower, the existence of which was denied by its manufacturer when the museum called them to ask for information.

You see the hallmark of the obsessive museum: endless exhibited permutations of the same-shaped thing. There are more than 200 mowers on display, all presenting similar silhouettes against the white wall, like a string of paper dolls cut out by someone who was really into lawnmowers.

Every now and then, however, the pattern is broken by intriguing one-offs, such as the Atco Training Car. Constructed as part of a wartime programme to teach people to drive, the Training Car is just Atco's standard lawnmower with the handles removed and some Noddy-car bodywork bolted to the top. Above it hangs a picture of dozens of happy motorists, their suited and hatted top-halves poking up from their Atco dodgems, putt-putting off to a brighter future.

That's not to say that the museum divorces itself from the modern world. As a goodwill gesture towards today's cult of celebrity there is a glittering line-up of star lawnmowers and garden tools. Rock fans will be excited to see Brian May's own majestic mower, and Jean Alexander (Hilda Ogden in Coronation Street) kindly donated her Qualcast Panther. 'Mega Star' Nicholas Parsons planned to give the museum his own lawnmower, but it was stolen, so he had to send some secateurs instead. Elsewhere Ainsley Harriott, Brian Sewell and Alan Titchmarsh have raided their sheds in the name of heritage and, if you look really carefully, you might catch a glimpse of perhaps the most unlikely museum exhibit in Britain: Joe Pasquale's strimmer.

The British Lawnmower Museum is one of the nation's great treasures. We British are rightly proud of our lawns, which give our green and pleasant land a lot of its green-and-pleasant-ness. The lawnmower, so redolent of Sunday morning pottering in the garden and glorious sixes scored over baize-smooth cricket pitches, is one of the things that make us who we are. The preservation of our heritage depends on enthusiasts choosing to care for the corners of history that might otherwise be ignored. There's more obvious glamour in old cars or motorbikes or steam trains, but that means there are plenty of people prepared to save them from the scrapheap. The team here have shunned the comparative limelight in order to shower their love on an engineering underdog, and there's nothing more British than that.