Mark Dixon

T he E nthusiast

Last night, I was enjoying a pint in the pub with my mate Peter, who had just returned from the ’Normous Newark Autojumble. Peter had been on the hunt for a 1950s Ford Anglia engine – he needs one for a Ginetta sports car project – and was bemoaning the fact that even a bog-standard Anglia engine requiring a total rebuild seems to command £250 these days.

We shouldn’t be surprised, I guess, but it still comes as a bit of a shock when something you thought you could pick up for 75 or 100 quid is valued at a whole lot more. Fact is that time moves on, and it’s too easy to forget that a situation that existed 20 years ago is exactly that: a whole two decades older than you remember. The truth is that a 1950s engine will have had to survive the best part of 60 years to get this far, so it’s entirely reasonable that it should now be worth a fair bit more than scrap value alone.

My friend’s wake-up call reminded me of the difficulty that LRM’S Patrick Cruywagen, Steve Miller, Trevor Cuthbert and David Lillywhite faced when trying to source vehicles for next month’s feature on The Best £1000 Land Rover. Every one of them really wanted to be the person who turned up with a Series Land Rover for under a grand, but it very quickly became clear that it wasn’t going to happen. Reality check: you just can’t buy any Series Landy with an MOT for £1000.

Alright, there are always going to be exceptions. You might find some dodgy garage willing to flog a knackered Series III with a smoky two-and-a-quarter diesel and a rotten chassis, and an even more rotten MOT certificate, for that money. But anything that’s even vaguely safe and usable is going to be twice that amount or more.

How did this happen? It doesn’t seem that long ago that you could buy a scruffy Series II or III for £750. But then old Land Rovers stopped being driven by farmers and/or weird hippy types and became cool lifestyle accessories. I reckon you can date the year this happened exactly. It was 1994, when the movie Four Weddings And A Funeral was released, in which James Fleet’s character, the posh but hopelessly bumbling Tom, drives a Series II (registered WUR 370E, and apparently still taxed and Mot’d – where are you now?). From that point on, Joe Public started to think of old Land Rovers as timeless pieces of British design good enough for the aristocracy rather than simply as cheap transport for rural peasants who let their dogs sleep on their beds.

I was thinking about this transition from uncool to sub-zero, as Top Gear used to put it, just the other day, when someone rang up to ask my opinion on what the public thinks of classic cars these days. I’m convinced that the huge interest in classics, even among people who can’t tell an MGB from a Maserati, is partly due to the rise of the Apple corporation. We are all so much more designliterate now, and it’s a trend that was kick-started by the arrival of the imac in 1998. Until then, computers had been dull, beige boxes designed by dull, beige computer geeks; suddenly you could buy one that was shaped like a tangerine or lime-coloured egg. And then came the ipod and the iphone, and before we knew it we were all ordering skinny mocha lattes and sporting artfully trimmed stubble. In the adverts, at least.

Good design became recognised by the man in the street. Since the 1990s, no TV commercial, celebrity-fronted show or primetime drama worth its salt has been devoid of an “interesting” car. Land Rovers have played their part, of course. Remember district nurse Carol Cassidy’s Series IIA in Heartbeat? Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s Series III Lightweight? And as a result, if you drive such a vehicle yourself you’re no longer considered slightly odd; you’re part of the zeitgeist, a mover and a shaker. You are an individual.

The process of “classic-isation” of old Land Rovers was massively fuelled by the death of the Defender in 2016. Speculators started snapping up the last batch of new vehicles and the prices of old ones climbed as a result. Series Is went ballistic and they’ve dragged IIS and IIIS up behind them, to a level that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago.

So have the days of the cheap Land Rover gone for good? Well, if you have your heart set on a Series-shaped vehicle, then yes – possibly. Although “cheap” is a relative term, of course. Last year I came close to buying a 1962 LWB Series IIA hardtop, with original three- digit and three-letter registration, from a dealer for £3500. It steered better than almost any Series vehicle I’ve driven, it had a very solid chassis and in terms of metal-for-your-money I thought it was pretty good value.

But for real value, you have to think outside the box. Would you have imagined, until recently, that you could buy a halfdecent P38A Range Rover for £1000? Read next month’s issue of LRM and you’ll find out…

Maybe we are actually living through another golden age of cheap Land Rovers; it’s just that we haven’t realised it yet.