YESTERDAY I spent a few enjoyable few hours with Brian and Sue Radam at their British Lawnmower Museum at Southport. This is for book I am writing called The Budding Legacy, a celebration of lawnmowers through the ages and their contribution to our sporting, social and cultural life (to be published in April).

The museum has become one of the North West’s most popular attractions, getting over 6,000 visitors a year and has grown extensively since my last visit at least ten years ago.

It’s a nostalgia trip, a peek at the past. And you don’t need to be an anorak to appreciate the heritage and extraordinary unchanging nature of many of the mowers when compared with Budding’s original design from almost 200 years ago.

The museum is packed with machines across the ages, but even more eye-opening is Brian’s vast warehouse just down the road, absolutely packed with mowers donated by people who couldn’t bear to throw them away. Most are cylinder mowers from the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s. Atcos galore, Suffolk Punches, Ransomes Ajaxs, Greens, JP push mowers, you name it.  There is only room for one of each model in the museum itself.

Standing there, surrounded by a sea of handles, of machines finely engineered, robust, meant to last was to get a sense of how the era that many of us remember fondly is now well and truly behind us.

But the fact is that there is still a lively grass machinery industry, full of potential. But it is not, and never will be the same as when specialist dealers were the king-pins of the industry.

Today machines are smarter, customers are smarter, and the way they buy and access information has changed forever. Many dealers have responded to new conditions – but things are changing so fast that every organisation needs to keep abreast of new developments. There should never be knee-jerk reactions, and change for change's sake, for the values that encourage people to shop with an independent specialist retailer should never be tampered with. So it’s a question of evolution, rather than revolution.

All of which is the reason why we are excited to announce a new event, a dealer conference that will look at all the influences and issues that will face dealers over the next five years. What will Dealer 2020 look like?

That’s a question we aim to answer in November.