Morris Minor

Martin Wainwright

"The Morris Minor - Britain's first mass-appeal car - was designed by Sir Alec Issigonis in 1948. Between then and 1972 when production belatedly ceased some 1.6 million were built. In 2008 it is 60 years old, and now Martin Wainwright gives us a quirky and fascinating history of this quintessentially British car. He makes a pilgrimage to Bath to meet the man whose pioneering venture back in the seventies restoring and rebuilding Morris Minors kick-started the car's renaissance as a classic, covetable and ultimately indestructible breed. He ponders their bonnets' alarming habit of gaping open at speed entirely to obscure your vision, not to mention their infernally unreliable trunnions, and he waxes lyrical over the esoteric photo exhibition of some years back devoted entirely to abandoned Morris Minors on the West Coast of Ireland. Here is the story of a triumph of British...