I APPROACHED SHEPPEY under a big blue sky streaked lightly with cirrus, the sort of sky that Michael Caine’s burning Spitfire spiralled out of in The Battle of Britain, in fact the actual sky in which the actual battle was fought. No Hammer Horror mists that day: the bridge across the Swale channel delivered me from one bright and treeless flatland to another. The signpost at the Isle of Sheppey’s first roundabout was dominated by destinations beginning with HMP, but with the sea a-twinkle, my window down and the scent of warm meadow gusting in through it, I could sense that Leysdown would struggle to live up to its legend.
I parked up at the top of the road that led down to the seafront. Static caravans and garden-shed holiday chalets were still tightly crammed into surrounding fields. The chip shops were all present and correct, hawking jellied eels and pie and mash, so too the beach-crap vendors (FOLDING SUNBEDS – £12 – MAX WEIGHT 16 STONE). The pavement down to the promenade was still packed on both sides with amusement arcades, some of industrial enormity. It was all very much as I remembered, in every respect but one: here we were on a sun-kissed, fog-free afternoon two weeks into the school holidays, and the whole place was deserted. No one in the chip shops or on the streets. No one in the expansive promenade conveniences to defy the stern edict on the washing of feet in hand basins. No one on the promenade to gaze out at the view: two distant clusters of old sea forts, like Nissen huts on stilts, the revolving Mercedes stars of an offshore wind farm, a container vessel as massive and graceless as a Gorbals tower block pushed on to its side. And right round to the east, looking yachty and clean and fresh, visibly thriving even from this distance, Whitstable. I’ve still never been there.
I peered over the dour sea wall: high tide, with the calm, moss-mud sea drawn right up to a sliver of beach more gravel than sand. At last I discovered I wasn’t alone, not quite. A man in goggles was performing slow and methodical breaststroke a few yards offshore. Right up by the concrete squatted a skinhead aged about ten, manically excavating deep into the gritty shingle. Some way off to the west, a clutch of distant figures was either playing a very slow-paced game of hockey or detecting metal.
What had happened? I’d seen this place packed in a pea-souper. Concern was tempered with slight irritation: it felt as if I’d come a long way to visit a distant relative in some rather rundown care home, and found them unrousably asleep.
One possible explanation suggested itself in the ‘Bathing Water Quality’ chart I now found prominently displayed on the seafront ‘information point’. By means of a simple coding system – a smiley green face, a straight-mouthed amber one and a grumpy red – this recorded levels of ‘faecal coliform’ and ‘faecal streptococci’ present in samples drawn from Leysdown beach, going back many years. The faces, like faeces, were a blend of green and yellow, but as the footnotes explained, even the smiles merely denoted that untreated human waste was present in quantities someone had deemed acceptable. A tip for Swale Borough Council tourist officials: there are certain things that you should never boast about finding only some of on your beaches. Landmines and paedophiles would be two of these; faeces a third.
I walked north-west along the blowy seafront, where someone had etched ‘I HATE THIS FUCKING PLACE’ into the top of a mossy groyne. At length the coastal backdrop rose into a steep hill and the sea wall petered out. Beyond it the waves had gone to work, bringing down the landscape in great clods that blocked the path. And not just the landscape: the lumps of mud were studded with hunks of masonry and tiling, even a few shattered urinals, presumably the remains of some clifftop holiday complex.
I turned back and soon chanced upon a caravan village, dug down into the tussocked dunes. With its tight-packed rows of statics hemmed in around a bow-fronted retaining wall, from above it resembled one of those awful diagrams of an eighteenth-century slave ship. In lumpy open grass at its centre, a quorum of holidaymakers finally presented themselves: a couple of pottering grandfathers in cardigans and sharp-creased trousers, four fat dads hoofing a St George beach-ball about. But well over half the caravans were shuttered up and flagrantly unoccupied, and most of those that weren’t had stripy windbreaks staked out by their doors. It’s always seemed to me that any holiday requiring such equipment is fatally flawed from the outset. Would you send your kids to a school that handed out Geiger counters at the gate? There is literally no difference.
It was a further half an hour before I found everyone, or at least the balance of the three dozen people who apparently sustained the town. As a risk-averse econophile I’m not a natural gambler, but walking up past the first arcade I saw a sign yelling 10P BINGO – IT’S BACK! That sounded like my kind of low-rolling joint; I walked into the garish cacophony and found myself amongst friends.
In fact no one was playing bingo, 10p or otherwise. Nor had the patrons been enticed by the complimentary shrink-wrapped sarnies and packets of cheese-and-onion on offer in the roped-off ‘Over 18s VIP area’, with its £500-jackpot fruit machines. A couple of youths were engaged in a desultory round of air hockey. Absolutely everyone else, from seven to seventy, was pressed up against the glazed façade of one of the ranks and ranks of that fairground gaming staple of my youth, Crompton’s Penny Falls. For those unfamiliar with this hallowed arcade institution, here’s the procedure: players release a coin (in this instance an inflation-adjusted 2p) into a lofty slot, and watch it drop down to a stack of other such coins on the highest of two moving, mirrored shelves. The aim is to dislodge coins from this shelf to the one beneath, and in turn – with a glorious clatter of ill-gotten gain – into a winnings slot somewhere down at knee level.
I palmed a pound’s worth of twos from a dead-eyed young woman in the sentry-box change booth, and after a quick recce installed myself before a teetering shelf of coppers. As any tight-arse of a certain age will confirm, it is possible to harvest a steady profit from such machines with no more than a grasp of the basic laws of gravity, an unusually high boredom threshold and at least one functioning eye. But without wishing to do my fellow gamblers down, they seemed deficient in one of these departments, and it certainly wasn’t either of the last two. My regular tuppenny landslides were going unechoed; nobody else was winning. Faces old and young were set in that joyless death-mask of recidivist slot-feeders the world over – it’s funny how little amusement you ever see at these eponymous places – but practice had not made perfect. Low-stakes arcade gambling appeared to be the only thing that anyone ever did in Leysdown, and they were all still really bad at it. Indeed the muffled metallic crashes and occasional yelps of pain suggested many regulars had yet to master the entry-level skill: inserting coins into a slot without spilling them all over the carpet or really hurting themselves.
When, after perhaps forty-five minutes, I noisily piled my winnings on to the change-girl’s counter, she looked down at the heap as if it was some sort of dying seabird.
‘Wossat?’
I acquainted her with what was clearly an unencountered situation, that of a customer who had played the shelves and come out on top, and now wished to exchange many coins of low denomination for a smaller number with higher individual value. Eventually, and with impressive truculence, she counted up my profits aloud, at a rate that pegged pennies to elapsing seconds. One hundred and twenty-eight, to be exact. I really am the daddy.
It wasn’t yet seven, but the chip shop at the top of the road was already putting chairs upside-down on its tables. I hurried in, and emerged a moment later with a tray of chips recklessly doused in that watery brown sauce made from Bovril and Sunny Delight. I ate what I could – the whole sickly lot, as it turned out – and roamed Leysdown’s main thoroughfare in the dying sun, hunting for ways to string out these last moments of workshy freedom. There were only two, and both were pubs. The first was a slab-sided edifice down by the seafront. The Talk of the Town – A Fun Pub! read a legend that ran the full length of the building. I peered in and found it entirely empty but for a barman and a denim-suited DJ, leaning arms-folded against his PA speakers. The second, a stoutly traditional affair called the Rose & Crown, was home to half a dozen drinkers, and the most appalling stench.
‘Fuckinell, wossat stink?’
I faltered inside the dim threshold, wavering between a diplomatic half-pint and brusque flight.
‘Is it you, mate? You done summing in your trousers?’
Amidst unvarnished cackles I looked over and met a trio of weathered and extremely happy male faces. ‘Don’t mind them,’ said the old barmaid when I presented her with my craven features. ‘It’s the farmer up the road, muck-spreading. Terrible business. Want to sign our petition?’ I did so, and rather than sit alone beside my tormentors, then stayed at the bar to sip my half in the barmaid’s company. Thus did I come to learn of Leysdown-on-Sea’s astounding past, challenging present and utterly hopeless future.
My own subsequent research has captured the Isle of Sheppey’s significance to such historical big-hitters as the Vikings (being the place they spent their first British winter), Henry VIII (who honeymooned with Anne Boleyn at Shurland Hall, just outside Leysdown), and the Dutch navy (which occupied the island for a week in 1667, securing Sheppey’s infamy as the only part of the British mainland to have endured a foreign invasion since 1066). But the barmaid’s history focused on Leysdown-on-Sea’s more recent and most extraordinary contribution to the annals. ‘Cradle of aviation,’ she said with an arch smile, explaining how in the summer of 1909, the Aero Club’s flying ground at Leysdown had witnessed the first flight by a British pilot in Britain. ‘Couple of weeks later, same feller went up with a pig in a basket,’ she said. ‘He was just having a laugh about flying pigs, but it went down as the world’s first cargo flight!’ Indeed, the centenary of John Moore-Brabazon’s pioneering achievements had just been marked by a carnival parade through Leysdown. She tilted her head at a poster beneath the pub’s telly: I’d missed it by two days.
Our conversation charted Leysdown’s descent from these high-flying glory days. As a Cockney Club Med it had been in steady decline since the Fifties, when the railway closed, every summer quieter than its predecessor. The hotels and guest houses had all gone, and occupancy at the caravan and chalet parks was now falling steeply away. It didn’t help that annual rates and ground rents apparently ran to £2,500 per pitch: ‘I mean, come on: you could have a proper olerdy for that, somewhere nice!’ These days, scratching a living in Leysdown meant feverish seasonal multi-tasking: cab driving, bar work, cleaning and maintenance in the holiday villages. When I mentioned how bustling the town had seemed one unpromising afternoon twenty years before, she barked a mirthless laugh. Since then the bus station and even the church had been demolished, she said. ‘Come back in another twenty and there’ll be nothing left.’
One of the burnished regulars had overheard all this, standing at the bar as he waited for his half-poured Guinness to settle. ‘If you think this place is buggered,’ he said, a little more amiably than the words imply, ‘you should go to Great bloody Yarmouth.’ All right, I thought as I walked out into the smelly night and made towards my car, maybe I will.
* * *
The revelations of Leysdown’s noble history and its ongoing, drawn-out demise nagged at me, stirring a melancholy that flourished deep into those family-free summer nights. In the small hours of one I found myself clicking through some online photos of Leysdown’s heyday, and gathered from a linked discussion forum that The Talk of the Town had abruptly closed down. Leysdown was on its deathbed, but those gathered around it hadn’t come to pay their respects. Declaring it the second-worst seaside resort in Britain, a travel blog encapsulated Leysdown as ‘an abandoned wilderness at the end of a 10-mile-long cul-de-sac’. A man who had spent a lot of time there while visiting his son in a Sheppey prison told the internet: ‘Come to Leysdown if you’re excessively fat and ugly, you will blend in ... It’s the end of the world, nobody finds it by accident and only the demented go there more than once.’ (A twin failure on my part.)
Yet countless thousands clearly had gone there more than once, had in fact gone there year after year. There they were in the archived photos, packing the beach and having the Brylcreemed, black-and-white time of their lives, and there they were in my memory, filing happily away into the late-Eighties summer fog. I wasn’t just mourning Leysdown, I realised, but the passing of a heroic breed of hardy, stiff-upper-lip Britons. The Windbreak Generation: our austere forefathers who didn’t mind a bit of fog and faecal coliform in their holiday mix. Now that spirit had died, and Leysdown-on-Sea was slipping into oblivion just as surely as the holiday complex I’d found in chunks at the foot of that crumbling cliff.
My portentous nostalgia soon outgrew the Isle of Sheppey. One night I found myself reminiscing on the iconic hangouts from a childhood spent in Ealing: the Wimpy and the Berni Inn on the Broadway, the Grace Brothers department-store double act of Bentalls and John Sanders, the ABC cinema in West Ealing. All cheerfully inept or tatty, or both, and all now long gone, replaced with sleek, competent and studiously unendearing commercial successors, or one of those dreary new-build residential blocks with kettle barbecues set out on a thousand never-used balconies. This same blandification would be ongoing right across the country, and in settlements far more significant, and far more awful, than the self-styled Queen of the Suburbs had ever been. There were so many fascinatingly terrible, terribly fascinating places all around Britain that I had never visited, never even been near, and as the fate of Leysdown made plain, time was running out.
Hunched at the computer on that final pizza-stubbled night of bachelor dishevelment, I tried to make sense of the beery melodrama sloshing around in my brain. At its core was a native weakness for the underdog, that very British affection for the neglected, the down-at-heel, the uselessly crap. A bass note of awed admiration for those who had no choice but to put up with it. And topping it all off a sudden, earnest conviction that this was my last chance to see these places before they were all knocked down and claimed by the ghostly Leysdown sea-fog, taking their stories with them.
By rights I should have calmed down after the family came home, but I’m afraid I absolutely didn’t. The nocturnal histrionics of summer begat a properly bonkers autumn, and when it ended there I was, juddering along behind a queue of brake lights as ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma’ gave way to Des O’Connor’s ‘Dick-A-Dum-Dum’. With Hanger Lane Gyratory System behind me I had successfully negotiated Britain’s worst road junction, and endured two of the most unpopular songs in the history of British popular music. A wisp of steam coiled forth from the bonnet of Britain’s least esteemed car, and a man endowed with Britain’s ugliest regional accent ordered me to turn right at the fucking roundabout, third exit. It was an early Saturday afternoon at the fag-end of November, four months since I’d come home from the Kentish seaside with my fingers stinking of chips and change. And half an hour since I’d set off on a Leysdown-inspired tour of the unloved, the rundown, the half-arsed and the hideous. All the brilliantly miserable crap, in short, that makes our country so bloody great.
As a basic understanding of animal behaviour tells us, it’s hard for any rational entity to commit a deliberate foreseeable wrong. I don’t mean moral transgressions or other such complexities, just any action with an obvious and instant negative impact upon one’s own well-being. ‘I am glad to have this fire; it was cold, and now I am warm. But oh! I have removed my trousers and sat down upon it.’ Or: ‘This porridge is both filling and delicious, yet I am pouring sand into it. Now it is less enjoyable to eat. Perhaps some more sand?’
Planning my trip meant unlearning several million years of such painfully accrued human knowledge. It meant asking friends and family for places they particularly wouldn’t recommend, clicking on the website tabs that sorted reviews from lowest to highest, conducting internet searches beside a thesaurus folded open on ‘bad’. This was the road-trip from hell, and to it.
I have to say I proved a fast unlearner, and swiftly rose to the challenge of making the worst of a bad job. Quite soon, indeed, I found myself looking for more and more wrong boxes to tick. If I was to visit the worst British towns, then it seemed only appropriate to stay in their worst hotels. To go to the worst restaurants and eat the worst food. Drink in the worst pubs, see the worst sights, drive the worst car while listening to the worst music. I confess I had begun to find the whole prospect rather exhilarating, in an oddly masochistic fashion: this was to be my down-and-dirty homage to the Windbreak Generation.
The basic framework for my tour was provided by a survey of the worst places to live in Britain, compiled in 2007 for property-based TV show Location, Location, Location. I approached this with extreme caution, suspecting that as a Channel 4 venture it would have been collated by Gok Wan, and based solely on the average household’s total of matching scatter cushions. In fact, the conclusions were derived from reams of sober and incontestable statistics related to things like air quality, crime, hours of sunshine, life expectancy, leisure facilities, employment rates, educational achievement. I might get sick of the programme’s stupid name (and did, immediately), but I couldn’t argue with their survey’s methodology or conclusions: any town that made the bottom twenty was an indubitably horrid place. (I might as well explain right now that although some of these places lay within the confines of greater London, I shall not be covering any of them. Partly as I’ve spent my entire life living in the capital, and was keen only to visit places I’d never been to, and partly as I’ve already written an entire – and wholly wonderful – book about London. I am consequently fated to come across in this one as the worst sort of sneering, hypocritical metropolitan ponce. Huzzah!)
I also drew upon a number of more opinionated but statistically credible polls organised by various magazines, radio and television shows and websites to find the nation’s most dreadful albums, buildings, high streets, beaches, foodstuffs, sea zoos, and so on. Beyond these came sundry harvested sources of diminishing credibility, on a scale that ran from the ropily agenda-driven to the frankly laughable. In descending order:
1) TripAdvisor and the many internet-based rivals offering user reviews of hotels, restaurants, visitor attractions and so forth. Beyond filtering out sparsely reviewed establishments whose dire ratings might be down to no more than some rogue individual grudge, my main challenge here was to root out any sore-thumb thumbs-ups: contributions supplied by a proprietor or lackey, in order to counter the welter of damning criticism and bump up a lowly average score. Happily, most seemed incapable of mustering even the tiniest degree of subtlety, singing their own five-star praises with a magnificent disregard for the language of genuine opinion. There was transparent bitterness: ‘All I can say is some people wouldn’t be satisfied if the Queen’s butler served them.’ There was hyperbole bred of rank desperation: ‘Please ignore all the negative reviews. Everything about this hotel is completely fantastic, and my wife cried when we left.’ Best of all, there was praise lavished where no sane visitor would ever lavish it: ‘The sign-posting was excellent’; ‘Refreshments were reasonably priced and there was ample parking’. How I loved that. ‘Is this parking ample, or what? I say we go straight home and positively review the hell out of it!’
2) Places and stuff that other people, drawing on personal experience, had assured me were disastrously run, ugly, daft, unpalatable or in some other way very badly wrong.
3) Places and stuff I’d always thought might be a bit rubbish.
4) Sky 3’s Britain’s Toughest … series of television programmes, an empirical nationwide investigation covering villages, pubs and twenty-four-hour dry-cleaners, would you believe (though you absolutely shouldn’t)?
5) Surveys compiled by market-research companies for corporate clients in the interests of garnering publicity. That which pronounced the Hanger Lane Gyratory System to be Britain’s worst road junction ranked amongst the more coherent of these, having been commissioned on behalf of some insurance company and thus bearing at least vague relevance to the client’s core business. More typically I encountered a cheerfully brazen disconnect. You know the sort of thing: ‘Two out of three Welshmen would eat a bar of soap for £800, reveals a poll carried out on behalf of Jack Russell’s, Guildford’s leading twenty-four-hour pet-supplies warehouse.’ Only an idiot would place any faith in the legitimacy of such asinine investigations. I must have used at least a dozen.
I was putting a lot of pins in my map, but still had to decide on the vehicle in which I’d be joining them all up. The runaway winner of most ‘worst ever British car’ polls was the Austin Allegro, that definitive 1970s British Leyland disaster: a wallowing, bulbous oaf swiftly nicknamed the ‘flying pig’, launched with a rectangular steering wheel and so ineptly designed that a wind-tunnel test found it was more aerodynamic going backwards. But even the newest Allegros were already twenty-seven years old, and it didn’t seem quite fair to put a geriatric through what I had in mind. Plus, the Allegro was already heading around the horn of post-modern irony, now so bad it was good, an object of ugly-duckling retro affection. I didn’t want any of that rubbish. In its dotage as the Austin Rover Group, our nationalised motor manufacturer had knocked out a bewildering array of truly abysmal cars; it was just a question of deciding upon the most awful, the least loved, the still unforgiven.
My epiphany was delivered one evening by a BBC4 re-run of a mid-Nineties BBC programme about people and their cars, entitled From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring. In the course of this, I watched a sales representative being interviewed while driving the car he’d been given to replace his Vauxhall Cavalier. ‘Obviously my wife knew I was getting a new company car,’ he said, knuckles whitening on the wheel. ‘When I told her it was an Austin Maestro, we both literally sat down and cried – we physically cried.’
I literally stood up and cheered – I physically cheered.
Since that happy moment I have acquired a great store of knowledge about the Austin Maestro, and I’m afraid I’m going to share a little of it with you now. No matter what my wife keeps telling me, I like to think that as a very British tale of delusion, sloth, incompetence and on-the-cheap botch-jobbery, it is the enthralling embodiment of everything my trip was about.
One day in the early 1980s, Austin Rover’s top brass sat down to do something they were good at: mulling over recent embarrassments. What had their globally successful Mini and Morris Minor possessed that the Allegro so patently lacked? Innovative design, reliability, circular steering wheels – these were the obvious answers. But there was another, and it came cheap: a name beginning with M. In great excitement the management drew up an appropriate shortlist of such names with which to endow the Allegro’s hatchbacked successor. To placate the perpetually troublesome trade unions, they even allowed their factory-floor workforce to vote on this short list. (I’m assuming the other options were things like Mudblood and Manbag, as Maestro seems very much like the best of a bad bunch. Sounds awful and looks worse: even members of the Maestro Owners’ Club still have trouble getting those vowels in the right order.)
No one knew then that the Austin Maestro would turn out to be the final ever British-designed, British-built mass-produced family car (its booted sister model, the Montego, was snarkily dubbed BL’s ‘last-chance saloon’). No one except perhaps Roy Axe, newly installed as Austin Rover’s head of design just before the car was launched in 1983. Some years later he recalled his first encounter with a pre-production example: ‘I was ushered into a room and stood in front of this object and asked, “What do you think of that?” It was the Maestro. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The car’s whole stance and proportion were wrong. Design was moving into more rounded forms and this car was back in the old folded-paper era. Its proportions were peculiar, too. In short, it was a complete shambles. I thought so and said so.’
Poor old Roy was surveying a design that had left the drawing board way back in 1976, and worse was to come when he lifted the bonnet and beheld an engine that had powered its first Austin over thirty years previously. ‘It was engineering of the Fifties not of the Eighties … The interior was even worse. The fascia panel was like a wet codfish, all floppy. The whole car was decades old in its thinking. When I said, “We have got to start again”, it was made clear to me that production was only four months off, so there was nothing anybody could do.’ One motoring magazine’s launch review drolly encapsulated the Maestro thus: ‘Truly a car for the 80s – or any 90-year-olds still up to driving.’
Then there were the build-quality issues that came to dominate – in fact, comprise – the Maestro-owning experience. The plastic bumpers shattered in the cold, and the dashboard swelled up and split in the sun. Wheels would randomly detach themselves, and when the car was jacked up to replace them, the windscreen popped out. Leaks sprang out everywhere – passengers sat in the back rather than endure the ever-water-logged front seat, and for drivers, even the standard under-arse plastic bag sometimes wasn’t enough: ‘In bad weather,’ recalled one owner, ‘I had to wear a raincoat.’ Living with the Maestro meant a permanent oil stain on your driveway, and a mechanical soundtrack that has been memorably compared to ‘a skeleton wanking in a biscuit tin’. ‘It wasn’t that unpleasant to drive,’ said Roy Axe, trying to find something nice to say about the car, ‘but things fell off it all the time.’
You might be starting to see where that tearful sales rep was coming from. But in doing so, you underestimate the more typically undiscerning, because-we’re-not-worth-it British motorist of the era. The Allegro was a terrible disappointment because in 1973, when it appeared, Britain still expected great things from its national motor manufacturer. Ten years later we expected nothing, and in the Maestro we got it. Wet pants, oil stains, a canned skelly knocking one out under the bonnet: small beer for the long-suffering, make-do, Leysdown-bound Windbreak Generation. In eleven years, 600,000 Maestros dribbled and creaked out of British showrooms.
Most weren’t around for long. The enthusiasm with which the car welcomed and retained water rolled out the browny-red carpet for Sir Rampant Corrosion, and early Maestros were being scrapped almost as fast as new ones rolled off the lines. Without any fond farewells, production quietly ceased in 1994. You may therefore imagine my surprise when I chanced upon a 1998 Maestro for sale – and in Slough, which seemed like the kind of place I ought to be going to anyway.
The realm of David Brent and the butt of John Betjeman’s come-friendly-bombs jibe, Slough is a trailblazing bad joke of a town – and just 15 miles down the road from me, the proverbial shit on my doorstep. I’d arranged to view this curious Maestro on a Saturday morning, and as the sun was out I went there on my bike. In fact, Slough proved disappointingly acceptable beneath blue skies, and via a route that bypassed the witheringly drab centrepiece structures featured in The Office title sequence. The last street I turned into was an inoffensive suburban cul-de-sac of recent construction, fronted by a petrol station with an en suite Tesco Express, and lined with compact pale-brick houses. A gawky, angular presence on one drive meant I didn’t need to check the door numbers.
It was a very long time since I’d seen an Austin Maestro in the flesh. The design had a flimsy, creased and somehow unconvincing air, too tall, too thin. And what an awful lot of glass: there’d be no hiding place in that Popemobile. But what really struck me about the car had nothing to do with all Maestros, just this particular one. From bumper to bumper it was almost eerily pristine, and gleamingly, sombrely black. I knew straight away that I would never find a more appropriate conveyance for my valedictory tour of rubbish Britain.
The vendor was a van driver called Craig, mild of manners and smooth of pate. Craig was a sensible, straightforward bachelor whose single eccentricity was a passion for the kind of anti-charismatic vehicles that Jeremy Clarkson likes to drop anvils on. (In addition to his Maestros – there was another parked across the road – he was bringing a dumpy 1980s single-decker bus back to whatever passed for its original glory.) He told me he’d bought the car I’d come to see from an elderly gent in the Midlands, who’d owned it from new; in twelve years’ combined ownership, the pair had clocked up just 14,546 evidently gentle miles. And why only twelve years, when the newest Maestro should just have turned sixteen? Craig smiled a little ruefully. ‘You’d better come inside,’ he said.
A cup of tea later I had the whole story. After the Maestro went out of UK production, Rover’s management team sought to offload the obsolete manufacturing machinery to East Europeans, echoing the deal that FIAT had struck with Soviet Russia to spawn the Lada. An arrangement was soon made with the Bulgarian government: in 1995, a production facility opened on the Black Sea coast, manufacturing Maestros tailored for the domestic market. To cope with Bulgaria’s challenging roads they were endowed with more rugged suspension and gearboxes, and to satisfy the nation’s evident Windbreak Extreme sense of hair-shirted unworthiness, there would be only one dourly spartan model. The intention was to sell ten thousand of these cars a year. When production ceased after seven months, the new company had managed to persuade just two hundred Bulgarians to buy a Maestro. Two hundred! Bulgarians!
It’s hard to imagine a more pathetic finale for the British motor industry, though the hapless Maestro managed to contrive one anyway. Around six hundred of the unsold Bulgarian cars were shipped to Britain by a West Country entrepreneur, who converted them to right-hand drive in a big shed round the back of a petrol station in Ledbury, Herefordshire. At £4,995 on the road they were the cheapest new cars you could buy in 1997, but it still took him four years to shift them all. And here I was being offered one for £500. A shiny, pampered motor vehicle with almost nothing on the clock and a full year’s MOT – that had to be worth £500 of anyone’s money. But at the end of the day, this was a Maestro. I offered Craig £450 and we shook on it.
In any other low-value second-hand-car transaction, that would have been that. Instead, like a father quizzing a prospective son-in-law, Craig began to probe my intentions. What was I planning to do with his pride and joy? Without lying, though not without feeling like a bit of a tosser, I said that I just fancied a tour around the country. For the first and only time his features hardened. ‘And what about when you’re done doing that?’ So it was that a while later, sat at Craig’s kitchen table over the registration documents and a pile of twenties, I heard myself pledging that when the moment came to part with my new acquisition, I would offer it exclusively to the membership of the Maestro Owners’ Club. ‘I’m very happy to hear you say that,’ Craig said quietly, as we walked out to the car. ‘It’s been bothering me all night.’ Then I bullied my bike into the boot, slammed it shut at the fifth violent attempt, and under Craig’s sombre gaze drove away.