KINGSLEY ULEZ REBORN RANGE ROVER CLASSIC

There are many companies that will restore your Mk1 Range Rover, but none of them do it quite like Kingsley

- MATT PRIOR

Somewhere that looks like nowhere particularly special, amid a nest of workshops behind a petrol station on the A40 just to the west of Oxford, is a place where one of the most influential British cars ever designed – the Mk1 Range Rover of 1969 – is being brought back to life.

Kingsley Cars is the kind of place you need to see in order to really believe that it exists. Proprietor Damon Oorloff has nurtured it from personal obsession to burgeoning professional operation over the past 20 years. There are now a number of firms in the UK that offer a ‘remastered’ Range Rover, but Kingsley is the sort on which those others almost wholly depend, because it can handle the really important metalworking.

Oorloff runs it with a mixture of passion, compulsion, thinly veiled mania and expert skill for these much-loved aristocratic SUVs, and he expects nothing less of the 20something technicians he employs.

Kingsley offers a number of restored and restomodded Range Rovers, having most of what it needs to strip, weld, recommission, repaint and rebuild them on site; and it has just added a special version intended to comply with London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone.

The ULEZ Reborn Range Rover Classic is a fully recommissioned three-door Range Rover based on a donor car originally registered before 1981 (so that it qualifies for a historic vehicle tax classification and thus dodges the ULEZ levy). The price for one (from, ahem, £125,000) doesn’t include the donor car, but don’t worry if you haven’t got one: at the last count, Oorloff owned more than 450 old Rangies of various vintages, so he can find you one pretty easily.