I’m utterly fascinated by history. The intrigue of times past has had me in a chokehold since, well, ever since I can remember.
When Autocar decided to digitise its then 125-year archive in 2020, I naturally flung myself into the project. It was more trouble than we ever imagined, but now we have an invaluable and unique resource for academics and enthusiasts alike: the entire history of the car, documented as it happened, week by week.
Not just facts but perspectives, opinions, societal context-things that are simply impossible to reconstruct, due to involuntary hindsight. Stories that haven’t yet crossed onto the internet. Best of all, text recognition allows us to track the development of stories across the years with a simple word search, rather than having to painstakingly comb annual indexes, where those even exist.
One of the first things I searched for once we had our digital archive was my hometown – a topic of great interest to me. I can still remember the fascination of being told that my primary school’s playing field was once a steam railway – it was a feeling of enlightenment that I experienced once again when Autocar issues of yore revealed yet more lost local attractions.
Enjoy full access to the complete Autocar archive at the magazineshop.com
I knew of Brighton’s Speed Trials and the Veteran Car Run, because both still existed. But I had no idea that the Currys shop a short walk from my childhood home in Hove had once been a vehicle works.
Thomas Harrington Ltd primarily made buses, but in the 1960s it also turned the Sunbeam Alpine into a kind of mini-Aston Martin that raced at Le Mans. Right there, where I had once glumly traipsed after my dad as he mulled over washing machines.
Likewise, I could scarcely believe that a part of the South Downs where I often walked the family dog had once, almost a century ago, been approved as the site for an international racing circuit – with its own aerodrome attached.
Supposedly the project’s backers even got as far as initial groundwork, but the exact reasons why Portslade never became as famous as Monza have unfortunately been lost to time.
And Autocar’s archive is far from the only fabulous online resource for history buffs. I’ve learned a massive amount about myself via Ancestry and the British Newspaper Archive – including that a great-great-grandfather of mine was a motor engineer who made the first motorcycle to run in Camberley. Also that he was in his younger years imprisoned for sales fraud, but you have to take the rough with the smooth …
Another favourite digital resource is Britain From Above, a digitised collection of more than a million photographs taken by pioneering aviators between the wars. Scroll around a map to see, in high resolution, how places of personal interest looked in past lives.
To compare and contrast is endlessly exciting; take a look at some of the UK’s biggest race circuits, for example, and you can track their evolution from pockmarked RAF airfield to glitzy, world-class sporting venue.
