Willington Classic Car Show

The late May bank holiday weekend can be a busy time for classic car owners, with no shortage of events throughout the country. My friend Mervyn organises a biannual show in his home village of Willington, near Bedford, so this was my destination yesterday. It is an informal event with no admission charge and no pre-booking, except for commercial vehicles to ensure space is available, so cars came and went throughout the afternoon and there was always something new to see. He estimated there was a record attendance this time of over 200 vehicles, and it was a very pleasant way to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon.

 

Unsung heroes: Bedford JJL

Most of the unsung heroes I have featured so far are cars, but the very first one was a bus and today I return to that theme. It's fair to say the Dennis Dart is one of the major success stories of the bus industry, bridging the gap between minibuses and full-size single-deckers and creating a whole new class of vehicle, but a similar bus could have appeared on the market over a decade before the Dart's 1989 launch. This was the Bedford JJL, an innovative rear-engined purpose-built minibus that was first revealed in prototype form back in 1976 but never reached production, and in many ways was a Dart before its time.

Bedford's biggest missed opportunity or the right product at the wrong time?

Unlucky 13 - the M1 junction's weirdness explained

As a frequent traveller to Bedford via Milton Keynes and the A421, I have often wondered why this road suddenly and inconveniently veers south-east and travels alongside the M1 motorway for a couple of miles before meeting it at junction 13, and then goes north again on the other side, adding several unnecessary miles to the journey. Having discovered that junction 13 itself in its original form featured in road enthusiasts' website CBRD's list of bad junctions, piecing together the various reader comments solved the mystery of the bigger picture and why the entire road layout in that area is a bit strange, so here is the explanation.

Why does the A421 go down to the motorway junction and back up the other side? Read on to find out...

Bringing the Albany out of obscurity

So you think you know about cars? Answer me this then...what is a Vauxhall Albany?


Never heard of it? I can't say I'm surprised as it seems to have been almost totally forgotten and by publishing this post I have doubled the amount of material about it available on the internet! The only other page I can find is on the excellent Vauxpedia, a first-stop resource for all things Vauxhall.

Vauxhall publicity photo of the elusive Albany. No one ever seems to have photographed one on the road!

So what was the Albany and why has it been consigned to the scrapyard of automotive history?

In short it was Vauxhall's first MPV, but also basically a Bedford Midi van with windows. Although the Midi was already well established in minibus form, these were utilitarian vehicles aimed squarely at the commercial market, and the success of the likes of the Renault Espace prompted Vauxhall to produce a far more upmarket car-like seven-seater.

The Bedford Midi. Fine as a van but did it ever stand a chance in the MPV market?

The Albany was launched at the 1990 British Motor Show and featured an impressive list of standard equipment that was certainly a cut above the basic Midi, including tinted glass, twin sunroofs, reclining seats, separate rear heating and power steering. Sadly, all of these luxuries couldn't disguise the fact it was very obviously based not only on a van, but a van that was starting to show its age against the competition. Only one brochure was ever issued for the Albany, which pictured the vehicle in various aspirational 'lifestyle' settings where it was horribly out of place but seemed to aim it primarily at business customers such as hotels and corporate shuttle services rather than private buyers.

The Albany brochure promoting its lifestyle credentials. The glider would probably be a more pleasant mode of transport.

The upshot of all this was that the Albany flopped. The range never expanded beyond a single model available in just two colours (the Bordeaux Red and Westminster Blue illustrated above) and propelled by a crude and underpowered 2-litre petrol engine. Perhaps more significantly than the vehicle's own failings though, the market for luxury van-derived MPVs we see today exemplified by the Ford Tourneo and Mercedes Viano just didn't exist 25 years ago and cars such as the Espace were aimed very much at the small niche of providing fairly basic transport for large families without portraying a prestige image, so the Albany's 'executive' credentials were somewhat misplaced. Only 300 were officially sold before it was quietly dropped just over a year after launch, and around half of those are said to have actually been registered either by dealers or by Vauxhall themselves in a desperate attempt to improve the dire sales figures. Vauxhall's next attempt at an MPV, the American-built Sintra, met with little more success but it was third time lucky with the innovative Zafira.


I actually have some recollection of seeing an Albany in real life. A large family in the village where I went to primary school had a red one - this was the early nineties so they probably bought it new. Even in my very young mind I knew it was basically a van and vastly inferior to the Mitsubishi Space Wagon my parents had at the time. Today there are apparently only two left on the road and the model has disappeared into almost total obscurity - has anyone actually seen one?

So there you have it, my own little tribute to a tiny, insignificant and forgotten part of automotive history.