Morris Minor - Martin Wainwright

A celebration of cultural detail, memory, obsession, and of lives lived by choice in the slow, humane lane Independent

The split screen, the indicators poking up like perspex orange fingers, the notoriously rust-prone floors, the pootling exhaust note just some of the much-loved characteristics of the Morris Minor or Morris 1000. Designed by Sir Alec Issigonis back in 1948, this bulbous little creation was Britains first mass-appeal car. By 1972 some 1.6 million were built. There were variants like the Morris Traveller (timber-framed estate) and the Morris Million (painted pink). For thousands of newly marrieds, or penurious students, it was their first car. It was also the kind of car in which the district nurse did her rounds.
Martin Wainwright (who proposed to his wife over the gearstick of a Morris Minor) gives us a quirky and fascinating history of this quintessentially British car. Youll find everything from the post-70s vogue for restoring and rebuilding Morris Minors, to the alarming habit of their bonnets to open at speed and entirely obscure your vision, not to mention the esoteric photo exhibition devoted to abandoned Morris Minors on the West Coast of Ireland.
A very solid seller in hardback, it is now in B-format paperback.

Martin Wainwright is the author of The Guardian Book of April Fools Day, and editor of A Lifetime of Mountains and A Gleaming Landscape (all Aurum). He lives in Leeds. His latest book for Aurum is on the Mini.