Sue Baker honoured by National Motor Museum

Pioneering female motoring journalist, Top Gear presenter and former Guild Chair, the late Sue Baker has been commemorated with a blue plaque (writes Chris Adamson) – but it isn’t on the street where she was born or a house she lived in, instead it appears as part of a new £600,000 exhibition at the National Motor Museum.

‘Driven: Britain’s Motoring Story’ is a radical reinterpretation of the UK’s motoring heritage on the first floor of the New Forest museum and is the most significant up-grade to the popular tourist attraction since the purpose-built museum was opened in July 1972.

Dotted around the new display space, which is divided into five colour-coded time zones, are a series of ‘blue plaques’ that recognise unsung heroes of motoring, such as Nils Bohlin (1920-2002) the inventor of the three-point safety belt, rally driver Pat Moss and Rose Boland, Eileen Pullen, Vera Sime, Gwen Davis and Sheila Douglas – sewing machinists at Ford who led a strike that resulted in the 1970 Equal Pay Act.

The blue plaque honouring Sue is located in the section titled ‘Plugged In: New Journeys’, under the heading ‘The New Pioneering Era’ which looks at some of the most recent advances in automotive technology. It appears alongside the upturned chassis from a 2016 Tesla Model S P90D and looks down on Europe’s first 3D-printed electric vehicle, the 2020 Chameleon.

This location is almost immediately above the Guild’s own display unit on the ground floor of the museum and it is just across a short walk from a plaque that celebrates the life of another famous Guild member – Murray Walker.

Murray’s green plaque (featuring the Guild logo) is at the entrance to the museum’s dedicated motorcycle section which is based around the collection put together by Murray’s father, the noted motorcycle racer, Graham Walker.