Bicester Heritage boss Daniel Geoghegan

The MD of Bicester Heritage explains how he is literally living the dream

I grew up in an old-car kind of family – Dad was an Alvis specialist, and owned a quaint country garage in Wales with an orchard full of classics he’d taken in part-exchange – but most of my professional career has been spent in London’s West End, helping new businesses. I’ve always loved starting a business from scratch. When I was about 13 or 14, I bought the exclusive rights to sell Alvis mascots that were made by the original company, Louis Lejeune.

That led to bartering in other old car parts and eventually to trading in classic cars, the income from which put me through university. I remember selling a Lagonda V12 drophead and I would regularly deliver cars to Continental customers from UK restorers. One of my earliest contacts was a Dutchman called Bob Meijer, who now sits on the Board of Bicester Heritage, and with whom I share a number of cars, including the Riley MPH pictured here.

Bicester Heritage came about as the result of a conversation I had with a chartered surveyor friend and fellow Alvis owner called Robert Britcher. He sent me the particulars about this ex-RAF bomber station that was for sale, and by Easter 2013 I had given up my job and collected a box of keys for the site – 300 sets of them! Octane helped by running a major feature about us in the early days [issue 134] and then the Benedict Cumberbatch movie The Imitation Game was filmed here and gave us a further boost. We’ve come a long way in almost five years but there’s a lot more to do. At about 15 acres, Bicester Heritage occupies maybe five percent of the total airfield, so there’s plenty of room, even with the airfield kept operational – there’s lots of brownfield land outside the two-mile perimeter track.

By Easter this year we’ll have 40 classic car specialists on site, and there’s a waiting list for further occupancy, so the heritage side is already well in hand. But Bicester Heritage’s mission statement is to provide an automotive destination for past, present and future – so we have plans for a hotel, exhibition space in the hangars, and an OEM-backed brand centre with ‘motor lodges’, the idea being that collectors can keep their cars here and live above the shop, so to speak, when they’re visiting.

I myself live across the road in the former RAF married quarters with my wife Victoria and six-month-old daughter. I get up at 7am to sort out breakfast and I’m in the office by 8-8.30am. I’m almost always to be found somewhere on site: we have a six-person team in the office, but as a growing company we’re always playing catch-up in terms of resources, so it’s a constant challenge. First job is to check what’s happened overnight on social media, after which about a third of my time will be spent liaising with our on-site team, with the remainder split between dealing with planning issues, talking with contractors, maintaining relationships with investors and so on. As you can imagine, I have a lot of meetings.

We have an office dog called Biggles, and it’s been interesting to watch the progression as Bicester has developed: at first the specialists brought their ‘toys’ here – the cars – and then they started bringing their dogs, and since 2013 we’ve had four babies born to tenants! Biggles is always keen for exercise, and I have a walk around the site every day to check that people are happy and find out if there’s anything we can do to help. Lunch is usually a sandwich at the recently opened café that’s adjacent to Auto Wax Works’ vehicle detailing workshop. There’s a window through which you can watch cars being prepped while you tuck into a ‘Supercharger’ meal deal…

I like to be back home by 7pm for our daughter’s bathtime; family time is very important. At weekends there is often something happening on-site but we may go off in one of the old cars. I’m lucky to have my father’s old Alvis Speed 20, a few Rileys that I share with Bob Meijer, and Earl Howe’s 1954 Fiat Topolino 500C, which is still in his racing colours. One of my favourites, however, is the 1972 Land Rover, a very late Series IIA, that you can see behind me in the photo. It was owned from new by a Mrs Lloyd who brought it to my father’s garage every year for an MoT and I’ve known it almost all my life. When she decided she was getting too old to drive, she offered it to me. It’s still only done a little over 30,000 miles from new.

In my time in the West End, I spent Monday to Friday working so that I could enjoy myself at the weekend by doing a vintage hillclimb or similar. Now I’m immersed in the old car world all week. Being surrounded by so much social history is just fantastic.

‘Bicester heritage occupies maybe five percent of the airfield site, so there’s plenty of room’