I don't own one myself (they don't make me happy), because I find it more convenient to rent. However, if I were in the market to buy, I would keep my eye open for a vintage marques, something Morgan, Bentley or Aston Martin, not so much a car as a frame of mind.
Worthy of a Monarch's telegram, the Morgan Motor Company is celebrating its hundredth birthday this year, incredibly still running as a family-owned business by Mr. Morgan himself, whose paternal grandfather founded the company in 1909. The company employs only 163 people, still assembles their cars by hand, and fills orders on a two year waiting list.
Incidentally, the Royal Automobile Club, which received its royal patronage by King Edward VII (Old Bertie was a motor car enthusiast), is arguably the grandest of all the gentlemen clubs in London. With Victorian Turkish baths, Italian marble swimming pools, I think I will stop by next time I'm in old Londontown.
Beaverbrook,
ReplyDeleteI don't often disagree with you, but as a native Torontonian I must make protest of the following:
"Anyone who has visited or lived in Los Angeles or Toronto, the two most hideously sprawling megaloposis's in North America (where car ownership exceeds 600 per 1000 people), will agree with Russell Kirk that the automobile is a village destroying mechanical Jacobin. "
We are well aware that Toronto is not Vancouver or Victoria, but there are no grounds for comparing it to Los Angeles. You must have been trapped on the 401 for an extended period of time to reach such a conclusion. Anyone who has visited, say, the downtown campus of the University of Toronto, or sections of King Street East would not reach so drastic a conclusion. While having only a small number of genuinely good modern buildings, it has scores of fine Victorian churches and leafy side streets. Even if you are not a fan of skyscrapers, though I am a fan of tall buildings, the whole city is not Mississauga writ large.
I do agree that an Aston is a frame of mind. Not that I could afford one.
ReplyDeleteI agree, Kipling, I don't think I mispoke here, just didn't speak enough about what I meant. Toronto itself is sufficiently Victorian to be an Imperial Capital, as you remind us almost daily on your own blog, and I would do it a huge diservice by comparing it to Hollywood.
ReplyDeleteOf course all large cities have their sprawling suburbs, but New York, Chicago, Vancouver and many other places have either benefited from better urban planning or better natural geography.
Greater Toronto has not benefited from either, it is an immense parkade, not so disimilar to the freeways of greater LA. More than once I have been informed that the Golden Horseshoe is only second in traffic density to LA in North America.