John Simister
John unpacks the joy of a garage for your classic
John extols the virtues of having space in which to work.
Acouple of columns ago I mentioned that I was buying back the grey Rover P6 I’d originally bought in 2014 to take to the Car of the Year test day. I was thrilled with the idea, and looked forward to luxuriating again in the Rover’s leather interior as bumps in the road passing beneath were smoothed effortlessly away. Well, it didn’t happen. The seller reneged on his agreement, decided to keep the car and that was that.
Caught on the rebound, I scoured the internet for another Rover and soon alighted on a well restored, very proper 2000 TC. Just two problems: it was a Series Two, it’s looks a chrome’n’glitz travesty of the Series One’s elegant restraint, and it was in Mexico Brown. A brown car. I just couldn’t do it.
Then I stepped back from the car-acquisition fever and contemplated my garage. I’m fortunate to have a garage of generous two-car dimensions, which is how I was able to squeeze three narrow cars into it with the central one, my 1934 Singer Le Mans, on those rather useful giant castors. But with the garage currently inhabited only by the Singer and my 1961 Saab 96 two-stroke, there is space to move around them, look at them properly, work on them easily and take them out without solving an automotive Rubik’s Cube.
Simple pleasures
It is, frankly, a joy, one that I’d forgotten about. Come the winter I’ll squeeze the Saab and Singer back together again to make room for the Eunos Roadster, whose plastic rear window tends to go a bit cloudy and whose boot attracts condensation in cold weather, but right now the Eunos is quite happy outside.
Two of my garage’s walls are retaining walls for the garden behind, the consequence of living on a Chiltern hill, and it used to be quite damp until I had it ‘tanked’ with an epoxy coating (walls and floor, plus, a screed of rendering). This has been a total success, resulting in a garage rather better than the one next to my parents’ house when I was growing up and starting to play with real cars.
That one had originally been a very old pigeon loft, quaint with its beams but full of woodworm and rot. It lozenged a little into a parallelogram when I attached a block and tackle to a roof beam and hauled the engine out of my Sunbeam Rapier, so the doors wouldn’t shut any more. No matter; we took the doors off and my father got a domestic rates reduction on the grounds we now had a carport instead of a garage.
I mention all this because having a garage is important to lovers of classic cars, and it’s a luxury that’s never been more precious. Normal people don’t really use garages for housing cars any more. They use garages to store things, or they convert them into part of the house. Modern cars live outside, and many of them are too big for what used to be a standard-size garage anyway. It’s a one-way street of garage attrition; in the longer term it could have a damaging effect on the numbers of people able to enjoy our hobby, simply because it will get harder to find somewhere to keep your classic car.
Throwaway society
Connected with this is the way people don’t look after their cars as well as they once did, nor do they value them as highly. This is because the cars are more durable, less demanding of attention from their owners and more easily acquired on a finance or leasing deal. It can lead to a shockingly wasteful attitude; recently a friend of a friend was about to scrap – yes, scrap – a 2007 Ford S-max perfectly good apart from what appeared to be an engine ECU fault. Anyway, my friend and another have jointly bought it for practically nothing, will get the fault fixed and use the Ford as a handy tow car and parts transporter.
It’s heartening to see that a backlash against the throwaway society is gaining ground, not just with cars but with all sorts of consumer goods. Local repair centres, often run by volunteers, are popping up that can fix your broken food mixer or misbehaving radio, and Jay Blades’ Repair Shop TV programme celebrates the joy of restoring and upcycling furniture, toys and more. We all know about bringing tired cars back to life, but could it become the new normal?