Car Mad: A Traveler’s Guide to Britain’s Automotive Culture

England is an exasperating contradiction when it comes to cars. The largest nation on this soggy, overcrowded archipelago in the North Sea is one of the world’s most hostile environments for an automobile, from the perpetual and corrosive damp to the ruinous potholes to the millions of cameras that are the unblinking sentinels for an asphyxiating, anti-car bureaucracy. And yet, England (separate from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, the states that make up the, ahem, barely United Kingdom) is a pilgrimage of sorts, for no nation offers as much automotive culture, such rich driving experiences, such historic ambience and storybook scenery in such a condensed space. The Brits love and celebrate cars almost as much as their own convoluted history, and it’s no accident that from a single hill in Oxfordshire, you can see the headquarters of four of the 10 teams currently running in Formula 1.

If there will always be an England, there will always be English car culture, and it’s well worth a week or three to take in some of Old Blighty’s manifest automotive treasures. A while back, I embarked on such a journey, relying on the steady trundling of an old Land Rover (what else?) to ply the slow lane of Britain’s teeming motorways and the vales and moors of its pastoral byways. The best part of visiting England for car stuff, I have learned, is that it really doesn’t matter when you go. The British accept their frequently dreary weather as a fact of life and have adapted their automotive activities accordingly. Circuit racing, club runs, cars and coffees, historic tours, hill climbs, and swap meets happen from April to October. Then the winter trialing season begins, everyone dressed in their deerstalkers, hunting tweeds, or Barbour waxed jackets as their cars bounce and squirm up hills through muddy slop. Thus, if you want to see classics in motion, not just parked in museums, there is almost certainly something happening whatever month you visit.

London Heathrow’s two parallel runways stretch over 12,000 feet each and typically handle more than 500 flights per day, moving upward of 80 million travelers through its five terminals every year. Meaning that no matter where you live, there is likely a convenient way to get here. The many rental car agencies lining Heathrow’s north fence often offer good deals in the offseason and are easily accessible by shuttle bus. Or, if you’re a bit braver, you can see England by classic car, as we did.

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If you’d like to spend some time “in Town,” first try to arrange a stop at the 114-year-old headquarters of the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall, a grand Edwardian edifice just a stone’s throw from St James’s Palace, an adjunct royal residence near Buckingham Palace. You must be invited by a member to enter or obtain a letter of introduction from one of the RAC’s 80 affiliated clubs around the world. Also, come dressed in coat and tie, but such courtly formalities are one of the reasons you travel to the Old World. The RAC’s so-called Clubhouse is just that, a club in the 19th-century definition with wood-paneled sitting rooms, ornate bars, a swimming pool, and squash courts. The opulent lobby usually has one or two classics on display that have been carefully loaded through the front doors, and it’s well worth nosing into the Great Gallery and the Brooklands Room to check out the trophies and paintings from England’s glorious motoring past. However, the real prize is the library, a book-lined cloister with an engrossing collection of racing and make-specific volumes, plus every car club magazine under the English sun. You could spend a month in this room alone and never be bored.

If you happen to be in London on the first Sunday in November, the RAC sponsors the annual London to Brighton Run, the world’s oldest motoring event, which commemorates the 1896 Locomotives on Highways Act. Recognizing automobiles as a distinct form of transport separate from steam tractors, the government exempted them from some of the country’s onerous regulations, including the need to have a person walking ahead of a vehicle waving a red flag. The era’s “automobilists” celebrated in 1896 by staging a rally from London to Brighton on the south coast, and after some fits and starts, the event has been going continually since 1927. It begins in Hyde Park with a ceremonial tearing of the red flag, and this past year, some 400 cars ranging in age from 1894 to 1904 and powered by gasoline, coal-fired steam, and electricity did the 54-mile drive over hill and shire, some of them taking eight hours. Thousands turn out along the route, many coming in classic cars of all periods.

The Land Rover followed their lead, heading southwest from London for our roughly thousand-mile clockwise tour of England (truth be told, it was done over two separate trips). A stop at the Brooklands Museum in Weybridge is a must. What little remains of the 2.8-mile banked oval built here in 1907 is for many Britons the spiritual heart of British motorsports. Constructed four years before the inaugural Indianapolis 500, it was the first purpose-built racetrack in a nation destined to elevate motorsports to a national industry and passion. Today, the museum is a mix of racing and aviation displays housed in buildings clustered at the north end of the oval, the only stretch of the all-concrete track that has survived the intervening years since racing ended in 1939. As always, check the museum’s website (brooklandsmuseum.com) for a list of events, as there are special exhibitions and club meets there all year long.

Southern England with its rolling knolls and forests and its villages of stone houses and taverns is blessed with the nation’s best weather as well as some of its finest restoration shops and classic-car dealers. The Goodwood Estate and Circuit in Chichester is the vortex of it all, the site of three of England’s best car events: the Goodwood Members’ Meeting in April, the Goodwood Festival of Speed in July, and the historic Goodwood Revival in September, in which the vintage-dressed crowd of 150,000 serves as extras in a nostalgic reverie of past racing glory. Inside the fence is Britain’s best vintage race meeting, while outside in the parking lot is Britain’s best classic-car show thanks to the hundreds of old motors that are driven in.

Don’t despair if your travel plans miss these three marquee events, for Goodwood now hosts track days and club meets throughout the year, and you can sign up to drive classic or modern cars on the circuit or vintage Land Rovers on an adjacent off-road course. It’s worth checking out the list of activities at goodwood.com.

In answer to the development of agricultural steam engines that sometimes needed to be moved on roads, England had a national speed limit (2 mph) more than 20 years before the world’s first passenger car, the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, chugged its first mile. Things haven’t gotten much easier for British motorists since, the government throttling its drivers and its own auto industry with heavy taxes, first on displacement, then on fuel. The U.K. historically has maintained some of the highest fuel taxes in Europe, and in recent years, new low-emissions zones in cities make owning older cars more difficult.

And yet, in 2017—again with the contradictions—the Ministry of Transport exempted cars more than 40 years old from both road tax and an annual safety check, a notoriously nitpicky test known locally as “the MOT.” The exemption was a prudent move; it has helped keep alive the country’s thriving industry for maintaining, restoring, and reproducing parts for old cars.

If you happen to be in England in early September the week before the Goodwood Revival, head to the Beaulieu International Autojumble, an enormous swap meet and car market that is effectively the Hershey of England. Located only about an hour west of Goodwood in the beautiful New Forest National Park, Beaulieu (pronounced Boo-lee, we don’t know why) lines up hundreds of vendors selling every imaginable auto widget—with a heavy emphasis on British makes, of course. Whether you want a neon-lit MG sign or a distributor cap for a Humber Super Snipe, you’ll find it at Beaulieu. I found some engine parts for my ’33 Austin Seven and the Landie got a vintage spare tire cover.

The Autojumble is held on the back lawn of the National Motor Museum, a cool destination by itself with a collection of 1.9 million individual items. Almost 300 cars and motorcycles—from an 1892 Bremer, believed to be the first four-wheeled car built in Britain, to the 200-mph Irving-Napier Special from 1929 nicknamed the Golden Arrow, to an assortment of modern F1 and Le Mans cars—tell the tale of motorized transport and racing in the U.K. over the past 130 years. As always, there are special events on the museum’s calendar all year long, including a spring Autojumble in May, so check the museum’s website (beaulieu.co.uk) before you go.

Out here in the more rural southwest, it’s easier to forget that England has nearly the same population as France but in one-quarter of the land area. They cram onto a 190,000-mile road network, almost 90 percent of which are small rural lanes that have barely changed in the past century. It’s one reason the government has heavily taxed motor vehicles to help pay for the country’s extensive rail network. The Brits complain about their trains almost as much as the weather—though to a trainless American, the system seems incredibly efficient. The narrow roads are also why the English tend to be pushy behind the wheel. Everyone here fancies themselves a direct descendant of Stirling Moss. Also, distances of just 10 miles can take eons as you conga-line in traffic down narrow country roads and through villages clotted with speed bumps, parked cars, and traffic cameras.

The claustrophobia greatly lessens the further you get from the large cities. There are museums aplenty in the countryside, especially if you’re a student of military history, as the south coast has a long naval tradition and was the launching site for the D-Day invasion. Southwick House near Portsmouth is where Eisenhower and his generals gathered on the eve of the invasion, and the map room, with its wall-size depiction of the invasion beaches, has been completely restored. Down the lane is the Golden Lion pub where Eisenhower took his draughts between meetings, the pub now serving what is thought to be a close facsimile of Ike’s preferred grog.

The Land Rover swung north, making a quick tourist stop in the ancient Roman spa town of Bath where beloved Regency author Jane Austen lived for a time and set some of her revered novels. The city of long Georgian row houses and famously curved terraces such as the Royal Crescent gets all dolled up in 18th-century finery for the annual 10-day Jane Austen Festival in mid-September. However, this World Heritage Site set in a lush valley cut by the River Avon is a joy to visit anytime of year.

Some of England’s surviving cottage car-makers are out west, including Ariel Motor Co. in Crewkerne near Bristol, and, a bit further north, Morgan Motor Co. at the foot of the scenic Malvern Hills. Morgan heartily welcomes visitors with a cafe and gift shop, and you can take a guided tour of the long sheds where Morgans have been hand-built from steel, aluminum, and steamed ash for more than 110 years. Unlike most factory tours that keep you at a distance, this one puts you right up close to the workers who build the cars, and they love to demonstrate their craft. Don’t be surprised if one hands you a piece of scrap aluminum and coaches you on how to feed it into a manual press that punches out rows of hood louvers.

At Morgan, you’re a stone’s throw from the famous Cotswolds, a rural district that the British government calls an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and some British wags cynically call the Costwolds. To be sure, this part of the country is pricey, both to live in and to visit, but it’s also fastidiously preserved, with ancient stone villages connected by meandering lanes skirting open pastures. Stenciled on the wall of a pub in Stow-on-the-Wold was this quote from Irish footballer George Best: “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds, and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.” A stop at the Diddly Squat Farm Shop near Chipping Norton is a must for fans of former BBC Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson, though the 45-minute wait just to enter the small shop seemed a bit much, so the Rover roved on.

A short jaunt to the east is Bicester Heritage (say Biss-ster—again, England), which with Goodwood is another epicenter of the British classic-car scene. The former RAF bomber base was converted into a campus of restoration workshops, dealers, and car storage facilities in 2013, with a full calendar of events to draw in visitors. Though the roster of tenants has waxed and waned owing to high rents, just the fact that the government handed the base not to salivating developers but to some pie-eyed car enthusiasts who promised to preserve the base’s buildings and grass airfield is evidence of how much the British love both their history and their old cars. The thrice-yearly Sunday Scrambles are a sort of cars and coffee on steroids, with most of the businesses throwing their doors open and classics from all eras and national origins lining the driveways between the restored red-brick military buildings.

Speaking of cars and coffee, England has a few roadside pubs that specifically cater to the car crowd. The best known is Caffeine & Machine, which has three locations in southern England, one about a 45-minute drive north from Bicester. There will be some kind of eye candy in the car park most of the time, but Wednesday nights and weekends are the big push days, with themes such as “Stras-senkultur” (German cars) and “Hatches” for hot hatchbacks. Check the online calendar at caffeineandmachine.com.

While you’re in the neighborhood, a mere 20 minutes up the road from Bicester is the current heart of British motorsports, the Silverstone Circuit. The anchor event, the Formula 1 British Grand Prix, is typically in early July (buy tickets, um, yesterday), but bikies can get their fix at MotoGP in late May, and the biggest vintage racing event on the British calendar, the Silverstone Festival, is in August. Meanwhile, there are other activities at the site all year long including track experiences, club meets, GT and touring car races, and the Vintage Sports Car Club’s wonderful season opener in April. We can’t recommend this grassroots event enough if you’re interested in racing and road cars from the golden silk-scarf era before the war.

Birmingham in the Midlands is in many ways the Detroit of Britain, the “Workshop of the World” being the epicenter of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution. Its environs thus became home to some of the nation’s celebrated car makes such as Aston Martin, Bentley, Jaguar, Land Rover, and Triumph. Each of these maintains its own historic collections that are worth a visit if you’re up this way and keen on a particular British make, and several also offer factory tours. The conditions vary; Bentley’s, which is at the former Rolls-Royce Merlin assembly plant in Crewe, is for customers only, for example, while Land Rover will take anyone on a trip through its Solihull assembly hall for the equivalent of $85–$90 (book in advance online at experience.landrover.co.uk). If that doesn’t wear you out, there’s the National Motorcycle Museum and the British Motor Museum, as well as numerous other small automotive and aviation museums scattered around Birmingham.

The further north you go, the wilder it gets, with England’s Lake District and its high North York Moors and Yorkshire Dales being spectacularly scenic as well as unforgettable to drive. The rolling, tempestuous landscape is also where Britain’s Victorian and Edwardian engineers let their hair down, building massive, soaring rail viaducts that, like the works of their Roman forebears, will still be standing in a thousand years. Britain’s rail empire was the wellspring and training ground for many of England’s pioneering carmakers, including Henry Royce and W.O. Bentley. Thus, the National Railway Museum in York is a must-see if you like huge, complex machines with lots of moving parts. Also, it’s well worth it to visit the York Minster, the city’s massive 13th-century cathedral, stroll the medieval Shambles shopping district, and walk on the city’s ancient walls, the earliest parts of which are around 2000 years old.

There’s no question where the Brits get their taste for smaller cars with blatty engines and hyperreactive steering. In much of the country, the archaic road network traces the intricate curves and folds of the land as though graders and excavators were never invented, serving up ample apexes per mile.

When you need to stretch the legs with a walk, pull over just about anywhere; Britain’s hallowed tradition of preserving the commoner’s right to amble, even across private land, means there’s almost certainly a public footpath in your immediate vicinity. Before you travel, it’s worth investing in a hiking app such as Gaia GPS for your phone to show you where the footpaths are, as they are not always clearly marked.

For war history buffs, eastern England was the site of many of the pastoral air bases from which the bombers and fighters were deployed against Nazi-occupied Europe. One of those, the 389th Bomb Group field at Hethel, became the site of Lotus Cars when founder Colin Chapman saw the abandoned runways over which scores of B-24s once roared as the makings of a perfect test track. He moved his factory there from the London suburbs in 1966. Today the company offers, for a price, tours of both its main assembly hall and the Lotus Heritage Centre across the street. The 389th Bomb Group Memorial Exhibition in a small Nissen hut located on the property is open every second Sunday of the month, and around the corner is the Bird in Hand, a quaint restaurant and inn that once served as the factory’s unofficial executive dining room. The bar and restaurant are adorned with trophies, technical drawings, old photos, bits of race cars, and other artifacts of Lotus history. Meanwhile, the rooms are cheap and clean and the breakfast is excellent.

Besides being the home of Mercedes-AMG F1 driver George Russell, Norfolk is also the location of the royal getaway at Sandringham, where the Queen once went to tend her race-horses. You can have high tea in the house or take a tour of the grounds in a vintage Land Rover. And if you’re there in late May, the Sandringham Pageant of Motoring is an enormous car gathering, foodie festival, and craft fair. Further south is the Snetterton Circuit, a hardcore racetrack for Britain’s minor leagues and a great place to see new talent battling fang-and-claw to climb the racing ladder. And as with so many British circuits, Snetterton was once a wartime air base.

Although British fuel is expensive, about $7 to the gallon, its gas stations are generally better at offering the traveler a wider variety of edible fare. The Brits have elevated boxed sandwiches to an art form, and an egg-and-cress or ploughman’s (cheddar, onion, pickle) from a box usually makes an excellent lunch on the go. If you want more, watch for the “Services” signs on the motorway, which point you to plazas that offer a variety of faster or slower hot food. And the larger supermarkets such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s tend to have cafes to the side that serve hot sandwiches, soup, and coffee.

As you head back south toward London, you’ll pass Britain’s largest aviation museum, the Imperial War Museum at Duxford, and it is a genuine crime not to stop to take a few hours to wander the many hangars and restored base buildings. Unless the weather is truly foul, there’s almost always something from the workshop being test-run or test-flown (I have been there four times and never not seen a Spitfire or P-51 aloft). As you can imagine, Duxford’s annual Battle of Britain Air Show over two days in early September is a glorious celebration of England’s audacious victory against the Luftwaffe in the earliest days of World War II (iwm.org.uk/visits/iwmduxford).

Not far to the east is the lesser-known Shuttleworth Collection, which celebrates the wire-wheel cars and wire-strung aircraft of the prewar era. Between April and October, something ancient and fabric-covered is usually put-puttering into the sky from the grass strip adjacent to the museum, which plays host to seven different air shows during the season and is a regular destination for car rallies. Set in a beautiful 875-acre estate presided over by the palatial 19th-century Shuttleworth House, this lesser-known attraction has become one of my favorite destinations in England (shuttleworth.org).

If, after all this, you step off the shuttle bus at Heathrow feeling you’ve barely scratched the surface of British car culture, it’s because you’re right (we have barely scratched it here). Something cool and fun and interesting that involves a car is happening somewhere in this green and pleasant land almost every hour of the week. The weather has forced the Brits to be even more creative in devising their own entertainments, from historic rallying that is every bit as competitive as when Ford Escorts and Lancia Fulvias were new, to the world’s largest military vehicle show, to round-the-clock recreations of the 24 Hours of Le Mans with slot cars. Nobody loves cars (and planes and ships and trains) more than this car-mad country, which is why we say Hail, Britannia!

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Going Old: Touring England in a Classic Car

Traveling England in something other than an anonymous rental cube takes a bit of effort and a lot more money. However, buying a classic overseas is like doing tourist delivery with a new Porsche or BMW; why not have an adventure with an old car before you bring it home?

Many common British classics, especially sedans, can be had for less than $15,000; it’s just a question of how old, how rare, and how fast and comfortable you need it to be. The good news is that any car capable of maintaining 55 mph, or even 50 mph, is adequate for touring England (our Land Rover had overdrive, thankfully). Traffic generally moves slower than in the U.S., and pokey vehicles such as tractors and heavy equipment are common on British roads, so don’t worry about being the only slowpoke.

Classic-car dealers abound, and online shopping sites such as carandclassic.com and ebay.uk are great places to look. Specialist shops can handle prepurchase inspections, and there are many storage businesses scattered around that will keep your car warm and dry until you arrive. Also, for reasons unknown, having a car trucked within England tends to be quite cheap compared with the U.S. And if emergencies arise, Halfords, the huge auto parts chain with locations throughout Britain, maintains a decent selection of tools and old-car stuff, including oil formulated for classics.

Best of all, you already know a company that will insure you. Hagerty’s U.K. operation is one of few underwriters there who will insure non-U.K. citizens. Plus, you get roadside assistance in the deal. It’s one thing to observe British car culture, quite another to live it firsthand from behind the wheel of a classic.

Stay Inn: Go Big and Stay Small

Although there are familiar chain motels in England such as Days Inn and Travelodge, staying in these sterile boxes is a lost opportunity. England is still the land of the small inn and tavern, with many villages having pubs that offer rooms upstairs or little hotels oozing with charm. Except around popular events, I prefer not to make reservations more than a day in advance, which allows me to wander at will and linger longer at interesting stopovers. Don’t be surprised if a two-minute conversation at a gas pump turns into two hours of looking over somebody’s private car collection. Thus, I use online booking apps such as Airbnb, which is different in the U.K. in that British hosts are generally more receptive to one-night stays and last-minute bookings. Many small inns list on both Airbnb and Hotels.com, which are easy ways to scan the available choices for where you wish to go next.

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This story first appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Join the club to receive our award-winning magazine and enjoy insider access to automotive events, discounts, roadside assistance, and more.