From Manchester's murky depths

Scott Adshead had just finished restoring a family heirloom MG when it was drowned in floodwater on New Year's Eve... but he didn't throw in the towel

- SOLLIE KEW

It just looks ‘right’ somehow. A leaky, draughty garage with no hot or cold running electric inside, backing onto a railway line. The natural habitat of the beleaguered British sports car perpetually midway through a hopeless restoration. But Scott Adshead’s MGB GT breaks that mould... while he fights to stop it going mouldy.

Scott isn’t your quintessentially bearded MG spanner. He’s 28, tinkering under the bonnet in designer trainers when I arrive. And this isn’t yet another tedious multi decade marriage killer destined never to turn a wheel. In fact, it’s approaching the end of Scott’s second glow up - after his first attempt was cruelly obliterated by a flood.

"I daily drive it - it never goes away for winter. Old boys see me doing my weekly shop in it and they're shocked, but personally I see it as a good daily," he tells me in a stout, no nonsense accent. “But maybe that’s ‘cos I’ve got the capability to fix it now.”

When Scott first began working on the car, he was at the mercy of the Manchester climate “working on it in all weathers, even the snow”, so finding a garage to rent (“they're gold dust round here”) was a godsend, however dingy. But given he works in IT, didn’t even learn to drive until he was 26 and has no previous mechanical or engineering experience, what possessed him to set about a 50 year old MG with the toolbox?