Last Sunday was the first sunny Sunday of the year. And, as usual, I was ambling along Chelsea’s King’s Road. What you might call ‘car ecology’ has always fascinated me, the relationship between certain cars and certain environments. Sometimes these relationships seem dissonant. For example, I’d be astonished if, on my next visit to Birkhall, the King’s retreat near Balmoral, I were to find a candy-apple green 1966 Chevy Chevelle SS parked near the stables. A muddy Series II Land Rover? Of course.
But more often these relationships seem just right, some of them defining our expectations of the car itself. London has always been a theatre where these relationships have been rehearsed, and the King’s Road has long been a crucible for alloying people and machines in meaningful symbiosis. In the 1960s, ambitious designer-entrepreneurs (I am thinking of Terence Conran) would cruise the length in their E-types, possibly stopping at The Chelsea Drugstore to admire the delivery girls in electric blue jump-suits with their rasping Vespas. The parking space outside might already have been taken by one of The Dave Clark Five in a Mini Cooper.
So it was last sunny Sunday that I was delighted to (first) hear, (second) see a tangerine-coloured (Arancia Miura) early Lamborghini Countach. The owner felt confident that the early sunshine would mean no rain, plus, importantly, an appreciative audience. Of course, it was stuck behind a snake of buses, each of them waiting for the two sets of temporary lights outside Marks & Spencer to shine in their favour. And then it would be a slow grind to Sloane Square, where roadworks have been officially mandated to exist forever. Yet the Lamborghini did not look absurd, it looked life-enhancing. I think I even saw a sunlit reflection from its periscopio.
Long ago, for a national newspaper I wrote one of my early studies on car ecology. This involved looking at estate agents’ full-page ads in Country Life and wondering if there was a correlation between the cars parked outside and the property prices. My methodology was crude, but effective. The presence of a Peugeot or a Vauxhall indicated a lower value than if there were a Mercedes or a Jaguar. (Jaguar? I said this was ‘long ago’.) I have seen this in my own street. When I arrived, th
