Silverstone
The home of British motor racing in Northamptonshire, from the museum to a Grand Prix weekend.
The home of British motor racing in Northamptonshire, from the museum to a Grand Prix weekend.
You don't have to be a petrolhead to feel the pull of Silverstone. The circuit sits just over the county line in Northamptonshire, near Towcester, straddling the border with Buckinghamshire on the site of a wartime airfield. From the cottage it is around forty minutes up through Deddington and Brackley, close enough that we have gone for a museum morning and been home in time for a late lunch in the garden. It also makes the cottage an unusually calm base for a Grand Prix weekend: all the noise and spectacle of the biggest date in British motorsport, and a quiet thatched retreat to come back to.
The circuit works on two speeds. Most of the year it is a museum and an experience day you can drop into on an ordinary weekend. On a handful of headline weekends it becomes the loudest, busiest place for miles, with grandstands, campsites and a ticket in your pocket booked months ahead. We have done both, and the two visits could not feel more different.
The Silverstone Museum is the easy, any-weather option, and genuinely good. It tells the story of the place from RAF airfield to Formula 1 home, with more than sixty hands-on exhibits: a pit-stop challenge, a wind tunnel, a wall of cars and helmets, and a booked simulator session in the Sim Suite where you can set a lap of the circuit itself. Children find it impossible to rush, and, if we are honest, so do most of the adults. There is a café on site for coffee and lunch, so you can easily give it the best part of a morning. It opens most days through the year, though entry is restricted during the big race meetings, so we keep museum trips to ordinary weekends and leave the race dates for racing.
For something more visceral, the circuit runs driving experiences on the tarmac Formula 1 cars actually use. They range from a first taste in a performance car up to single-seater sessions that leave your hands buzzing on the wheel, alongside supercar drives, ARDS race licence courses and the outdoor karting track. There are car and bike track days too if you want to bring your own. None of it is a walk-in: everything is booked ahead and dated, and the popular sessions go early, so it pays to reserve before you travel rather than hoping on the day.
The race calendar is the reason people plan a whole trip around Silverstone. The Formula 1 British Grand Prix each July is the headline, but the year runs deep with MotoGP, festivals for classic cars and touring car championships, and every one of them is ticketed and tied to a fixed date, so check the official what's on listings before you build a stay around it. The atmosphere on a big day is something else: you hear the cars long before you see them, and a full grandstand roaring is a sound you feel in your chest. If you are staying with us over a race weekend, we would arrive early and take the quieter lanes through Brackley and Syresham, because the main approaches slow to a crawl. Then you come home to the cottage, pour something cold in the garden, and the quiet does the rest.
“The first time I heard a Formula 1 car at full throttle, I understood what all the fuss was about. Silverstone on a Grand Prix weekend is pure electricity.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.