Supercar Scrapyard

We visit a breaker with a difference, stripping damaged wrecks of high-performance icons and selling their parts all over the world

- Martin Saarinen

YOU can spot them from a long way away: the mangled tops and bodies of Porsches, Ferraris and even a bright-green Lamborghini Gallardo. They sit up high on large, metal storage shelves, stacked neatly on top of one another with several columns reaching high into the sky. Drive further along the industrial estate in Wigan, Greater Manchester, and you’ll reach the front gate of Douglas Valley Breakers.

Step inside the compound and you’re greeted by one of the country’s biggest scrap and salvage yards for supercars. Or to put it another way, the final resting place for some of the greatest high-performance and luxury vehicles.

Crash your Porsche, Ferrari, TVR, Lotus, Aston Martin or anything that’s fast and interesting, and chances are that if the car is written off, it will end up at Douglas Valley Breakers. “Cars are classed into different categories when they are written off,” explains Graeme Cook, a member of the sales team. “Category A has to be scrapped, B cannot be put on the road but can be salvaged for parts and so on.

“We buy these cars, bidding against thousands of people at auctions across the UK, get them on site and strip them for parts that we then sell onwards.”

In other words, Douglas Valley Breakers isn’t just a resting place for these iconic cars; it’s also a donor centre that, according Cook, sells parts to customers with supercars all over the world.

Popular

There are hundreds of cars at Douglas Valley, but it’s easy to spot the most popular model: the Porsche Boxster. There are stacks and rows of them, from various years and in various states. Some look as if they only need a new front bumper to be back on the road, while others are barely recognisable.