THE FIRST DAYS OF DISCO

Die Hard was released. The Berlin Wall came down. And the first Discovery, the car Land Rover really didn’t want you to buy, emerged from the West Midlands

- Ben Oliver

TIME HAS NOT YET BEEN KIND TO THE original Land Rover discovery. For years you could buy the earliest examples of Land Rover’s other models — series 1s and three-door Range Rovers — for a few hundred quid. however, recently they’ve become the Instagram-friendly classic wheels of choice for the new breed of hipster car enthusiasts. they’re both rugged and retro and thus a perfect match for hipster beards and boots. Values have spiraled, not helped by the fact that for a while Land Rover themselves was buying up the good ones and doing factory restorations costing well into six figures for the Range Rovers.

The discovery has yet to be rediscovered and that seems unfair. it is 30 years since the original went on sale in the united kingdom and it quickly became the Ford Mondeo of the British upper-middle classes. Few of us really needed the original defender and while most of us want a Range Rover, relatively few of us can afford a new one. the discovery might not have the macho appeal of one or the glamour of the other, but back then it was the Land Rover that made the most sense for most people. it reached its first million sales in just 23 years — five fewer than the original “series” Land Rovers — and its popularity kept factories open and people employed in the West Midlands as its maker was being passed like an old fiver from Rover to BMW to Ford to tata.