Classic shrine: Morgan Experience Centre

By Simon Hucknall

| 26 Sep 2025

Classic & Sports Car – Classic shrine: Morgan Experience Centre

Morgan considers its Experience Centre to be a tourist destination as much as a focal point for die-hard brand enthusiasts.

Forming part of the hallowed Pickersleigh Road site in Malvern (although access is via Spring Lane), it’s free to visit and provides Morgan novices with a shop window into the historic company.

The café you enter after passing through reception is often used by locals as a meeting place, reinforcing the car maker’s strong links with the Worcestershire town.

Morgan’s prototype 3 Wheeler in the coffee shop, used by locals as well as marque aficionados

It sums up the manufacturer’s low-pressure approach to brand engagement.

In 2009, Morgan’s centenary year, the company bought what had been a social club and converted it into a visitor centre, which was opened by HRH the Princess Royal.

After Investindustrial purchased Morgan in 2019, the building was reconfigured, with the company’s product-design team responsible for the interior look and feel.

Today, the centre is run by a team of eight, plus a group of part-time ‘ambassadors’.

Morgan’s Pickersleigh Road factory is open for guided tours

While the Experience Centre can be the starting point for a full factory tour or a test drive in one of the current models, you can easily while away an hour or two as part of a flying visit.

There’s a small showroom for the modern range (with a Plus Four and Plus Six on display during our visit), along with plenty of trim swatches and colour charts – but, thankfully, no slick salespeople.

The café, which serves locally sourced produce, has as its centrepiece an early P101 prototype 3 Wheeler to ogle while you’re sipping your barista-made coffee.

The adjacent shop is well stocked with Morgan-branded clothing and accessories (presented in cabinets crafted by the firm’s own woodworkers), including a superb, handbuilt Pashley-Morgan bicycle.

The Pashley-Morgan bicycle takes inspiration from the British maker’s cars

The shop is also your starting point for what Morgan calls Experience Drives, which are bookable online ahead of a visit.

For £150, you can sample either a new Super 3 or Plus Four on a one-hour tour around the Malvern Hills, with a mandatory Morgan guide alongside you.

Or, for £120, you can take the same tour as a passenger, with the Morgan guide at the wheel.

Morgan also rents out the Super 3 and Plus Four by day, overnight or for a weekend.

Clockwise from top: historic Morgans on display in the Archive Room; bound volumes collate Morgan’s press cuttings; the Aero 8 GT was raced at Le Mans in 2004

The Experience Centre’s Archive Room is a must-see.

Atmospherically lit, with historic film continually projected on large sections of the walls, it is entered down a ramp flanked by a beautifully curated collection of scale-model Morgans.

When we visited, the main body of the room was occupied by a selection of eight classic models.

There was a painstaking recreation of founder HFS Morgan’s first production car, the Runabout, with its hand-throttle regulating the JAP V-twin engine, and steering by tiller.

Trophies and memorabilia on display in Morgan’s Archive Room

Other highlights included a rare example of the commercially flawed 1963 Plus 4 Plus; a 2009 AeroMax, the brainchild of student Matt Humphries (who, by dint of his creation, became Morgan’s chief designer aged just 21); the first production Plus 8 off the line from 1968; and an early 4-4 Coupé from 1939, which was campaigned by HFS in regularity trials before the Second World War.

Trophies fill glass-fronted cabinets around the room, along with around 30 bound volumes containing press cuttings from the earliest years of the company – media coverage of Morgan’s track exploits was a vital tool in its PR armoury.

Slightly more up to date is the 1987 copy of Autocar running the coverline: ‘145MPH! THE MORGAN THAT EATS PORSCHES,’ in reference to a racing Plus 8.

The original Runabout has been meticulously recreated

Illustrating Morgan’s pursuit of alternative power sources in recent years, the Archive Room also houses the 2016 EV3 concept.

Based on the 3 Wheeler, the car used a 61bhp electric motor and could achieve 0-62mph in less than 9 secs, with a range of up to 150 miles.

While the EV3 remained nothing more than a show car, last year’s XP-1 proved that a fully electric production Morgan is not a case of ‘if’ but ‘when’.

Sacrilegious to some but, as our host explains, even taking advantage of low-volume exemption to enable continued production of piston-powered cars, Morgan would still be reliant on an ever-decreasing supply of combustion engines from its third-party suppliers, which is an unsustainable situation.

The factory tour takes visitors from one end of Morgan’s production process to the other

For now, though, we can savour the fact that modern Morgans will continue to be fuelled by petrol – at least for the foreseeable future – and the best way to observe the integration of modern powertrains with traditional, handcrafted assembly is to take the factory tour.

Morgan used to hand people a map and allow them to wander around the works unaccompanied, but you can only imagine how that would play out today in our health-and-safety-conscious world.

On the upside, you undoubtedly learn so much more with a tour guide.

It costs £32.50 per adult for the two-hour tour (or £16.50 for children aged 5-11) and larger groups can be accommodated, with a discount of 10% if numbers exceed 16.

Body panels are dressed on a slave platform before they’re fitted to the chassis

Our tour started at the top of the factory, the buildings of which are largely unchanged from when the doors were opened in 1917 and beautifully preserved throughout the site.

Visitors start in the body shop and essentially follow the production of a car right through to final sign-off.

You can’t help but be impressed by the way Morgan has resisted modern manufacturing methods, an ethos that is core to its enduring appeal.

The aluminium and ash-framed bodies are initially created on a slave platform to ensure the correct fit before they are married to the chassis.

Morgan’s wooden buck is almost as old as the factory itself

Rear panels are hammered out by hand, with the angles and curves measured regularly.

There’s an ancient buck used to shape the rear wheelarches of the Plus Four and Plus Six – I’m told that it has always been there, at least in living memory, and responsible for the distinctive lines of thousands of cars over the years.

We’re introduced to programme operator David Andrews, who has been with Morgan for 26 years.

He’s operating a press brake, which applies up to 70 tonnes of weight to bend 2mm mild steel into the intricate shapes needed to form complex panels for the dashboard, plus engine and suspension mounts.

Clockwise from top: ash body-frame components ready for assembly; timber-frame construction in progress; a Morgan CX chassis is prepared, prior to fitting bodywork

Still a highly skilled process, it would have been done by eye in the past, and it’s just one example of how Morgan has been able to achieve greater consistency in build quality, while also reducing overall production times.

(It has undoubtedly contributed in some way to annual production rising from 500 cars a year to nearer 600-700 cars more recently, with a commensurate drop in buyers’ waiting times from five years to between six and 12 months.)

Despite the gloriously artisanal feel of the factory, it’s when you enter the chassis shop that the merging of ultra-modern technology with traditional manufacturing methods is laid bare.

The new CX chassis used for the Plus Four and Plus Six is all-aluminium, while double wishbones have replaced the cart springs that used to underpin Morgans of yore.

Customers’ Morgans return to Malvern for servicing

But it is the very modern-day powertrains – a Ford-sourced 1.5-litre triple for the Super 3, and turbocharged BMW four- and-six cylinder engines for the Plus Four and Plus Six models respectively – that, with their masses of wiring and emissions pipework, almost look incongruous in this traditional hall where once Aero Morgans were made.

The tour continues through the wood shop (all of the ash timber for the body frames is sourced from Lincolnshire) and then into the trim shop, where black or tan Bridge of Weir hides are used as standard in all Morgan products.

At this point, the cars have already been through paint and are near-complete, save the wings, which are fitted post-trim to avoid limiting cabin access.

Ready to roll – almost: a new Morgan Plus Six awaits its final once-over in the PDI bay at the end of the production line

This is also the area that best illustrates the vast array of different customer specifications: every Super 3 we see appears to be unique, but nothing beats the freshly built Speed Six in the centre of the hall, painted in British Racing Green with tan trim and evocative black wire wheels shod with 60-profile tyres.

Its consistently tight shutlines and the deep lustre of its paintwork epitomise the technological sea-change that has gripped Morgan in recent years, without affecting the inherent character of its products.

And that has clearly had a bearing on Morgan’s buyer profile, which is – reassuringly for its future – younger than before (although still predominantly above 45 years old), but less likely to be tolerant of a nostalgic product with indifferent build quality.

Morgan plays on its rich heritage in a refreshingly low-key way in its free Experience Centre

That demographic will also need to be wealthier than it was in the past, with rising development costs meaning that a typical new Morgan now retails at around £85,000, versus the £55-60,000 of five years ago.

That you can spend a mere fraction of that to immerse yourself in Morgan’s unique blend of esoteric Englishness for a few hours is deeply gratifying.

The factory tour is educational and inspiring, whether you are a potential buyer or not, and the fact that so much of the centre is free and can be part of an impromptu visit makes it an essential stop for all enthusiasts.

Images: Jack Harrison

The knowledge

Name Morgan Experience Centre
Address Pickersleigh Road, Malvern, Worcestershire WR14 2LL
Where South of Worcester, M5 jct 7
How much? Experience Centre free; factory tour £32.50 for adults, £16.50 for 5-11s
Opening hours Mon-Thurs, 8:30am-5pm, Fri-Sat, 8:30am-4pm
Tel 01684 573104
Web experience.morgan-motor.com