Marcus Briggs has been collecting and documenting hood ornaments for over fifteen years, building one of the most detailed private collections in Britain.
Hood ornaments were once standard on almost every car that rolled off a production line. They served no mechanical purpose at all. They were pure decoration, a small piece of sculpture bolted to the front of a machine. And for a few decades in the early and middle twentieth century, manufacturers competed to make them as beautiful and distinctive as possible.
The most famous is the Spirit of Ecstasy on a Rolls-Royce, designed by Charles Sykes in 1911. But there were hundreds of others. Jaguar had its leaping cat. Pontiac had its illuminated chieftain. Packard had a pelican. Buick had a woman leaning into the wind with her arms swept back. Some were chrome, some were brass, some were even lit from within.
By the 1970s they were disappearing. Safety regulations and changing design tastes meant fewer manufacturers bothered with them. Today they are mostly found in collections, at autojumbles, and occasionally still attached to cars that have survived long enough to become interesting again.
Each piece has a story. Who designed it, which models carried it, how many survive. The collection now includes over two hundred pieces spanning six decades of automotive history.