This fun and stylish car
only has three wheels.
The door is at the front
and the engine is at the back.

The model is called a Trojan 200.
The museum bought it
with help from the PRISM Grant Fund.

Frederick Andy talks about
putting Trojan bubble cars together:

"We did a batch of colours at a time;
would be light blue,
dark blue, yellow, grey, red.
I suppose we turned out
approximately 35 cars a week."

"We'd had thousands of spare parts
and engines -
and a very pricey item was the engine -
from Ireland
and of course these were
given to us for next to nothing
and so this kept the price of the car
down quite a lot.

Once we ran out of these parts
and we had to make our own,
press our own bodies
and buy the engines from Germany
it became a bit expensive.
And of course when you realise
at this time they brought out the Mini,
and the Mini was the same price
as our little bubble car
and we just could not really
compete with that."

The bubble car was designed
to cope with a petrol shortage
in the mid 1950s.
The Ernst Heinkel Company in Germany
created a car that could
go a long way with very little fuel.

The idea outlived the petrol crisis.
It was sold
to Dundalk Engineering in Ireland,
then to Lambretta-Trojan.

Bubble Cars were made by Trojan
in their factory on the Purley Way.
About 6000
were put together in Croydon
between 1961 and 1965.

This sound clip was created during the
I Am Here project. The group of 14-24
year olds selected objects close to their
heart that also said something about identity.

I Am Here is part of Stories of the World,
one of the major projects at the heart of the
London 2012 Cultural Olympiad.

"My name is Dammir, I'm 16. I live in Croydon.
Reasons why I chose the Bubble Car is
design, I think it is fantastic. Also it reminds
me of a helmet, think of the Olympics and
think of the cyclists that in the Olympics with
that little streamline helmet, which reminds me
of the car, that's what's the car design
probably is.

I like the car because it just reminds of how
wacky people use to be in the day. It reminds

me of my mum because I think that was like
the century she was born in, one of them.
It's just like a piece of history that like needs
to be here, part of me to the fact that I am
Croydon and so is the car because the car was
manufactured in Croydon, so to a certain extent
its part of me and I am part of it."