Outside influence

General Motors is all but absent from the European car market, yet it recently opened a new car design studio in the UK.

- STEVE CROPLEY finds out why PHOTOGRAPHY JOHN BRADSHAW

Ashbourne Drive sounds a bit more like a street full of retired bank managers than the location of an imposing, all-new General Motors advanced car design studio. But then Spa Park, through which Ashbourne Drive runs, isn’t your usual British industrial estate either, missing out on shabby factories, Portakabins selling burgers and cars badly parked on every footpath.

Instead, GM’s new European design base, quietly set up around three years ago on the outskirts of busy Leamington Spa by its director, Englishman Julian Thomson, is a tribute to the designer’s art in itself. It is one of those impressive industrial buildings of the modern era designed for maximum interior flexibility - in this case, spacious mezzanine floors front and rear for offices and meeting rooms, a covered working area on one side of the ground floor for around 30 people and huge windows on the other to flood the working area with light.

The whole thing provides 25,000 square feet of space, dedicated to unbridled creativity, and outside is a high-walled yard for exterior viewings, complete with its own dark Tarmac, because cars look different on real roads.

In the centre of the building - occupying the approximate space of two tennis courts - are spaces for half a dozen full-sized car models in development, overhung by automated milling machines that can shape designs, according to digital instructions, even when the human staff are asleep or away for the weekend.

All rooms are sparsely but expensively furnished: this place may have started life as an industrial unit, but there’s an aura of warmth and homeliness about it that encourages pride and feeds creativity.