Gordon Murray's Pretty Little Things

The cars that enchant this re-inventor of hypercars are smaller, lighter and daintier than you might expect

- Wayne Batty

As he’s a designer with six decades of experience, mostly at the pinnacle of road and race cars, you might expect Gordon Murray’s car collection to include big-ticket Ferrari, Lamborghini, Aston Martin and Porsche supercar staples.

After all, he was responsible for creating the McLaren F1, one of the fastest and most valuable collector cars of all time. Instead, the criteria (almost without exception) for a spot in Murray's 60-plus car personal collection are: ‘late-1950s or '60s, small, light and pretty’. Naturally you can include Lotus (of which he has 14), Abarth (5) and Zagato (5) in that list.

“These are the cars that I always loved and lusted after,’ says Gordon, as we descend a spiral staircase to a repurposed parking area beneath what was originally the HQ of the British Oxygen Company. Plans for the ‘molecular’ building above, at the north end of GMA’s 54-acre Highams Park site, include a mechanical engineering institute that'll follow a Murray-tailored syllabus. Expect graduates to be snapped up as fast as the next GMA T-model.

The door opens into a space brimming with mostly sub-one-ton machines that, despite being more petite than potent, have an allure usually reserved for cars far less humble. ‘It’s a very different collection,’ offers Murray. ‘We get GMA owners who have 100 cars themselves and they're down here for two or three hours just because the cars are all interesting, and they’ve all got stories’.