WHEN I visited Nick Parr in Kent a few years ago to write about his remarkable collection of Land Rovers (see LRM February 2021) the one you see here wasn’t there. I had to content myself with looking at a few photographs of it, but I agreed with Nick that I would come back when it had returned home. And now, three and a half years later, here I am again in Kent, hugely excited at the prospect of seeing the Automobile Association Road Service 80in for the first time.
Chassis number 36102343 is a 1953 model year Series I soft top that was built on the last day of December 1952 and despatched out to Henly’s of London on 7 January 1953. The reason that it wasn’t here during my last visit was because it was 250 miles away in North Yorkshire, part-way through what would prove to be a five-year, 1000-hour restoration carried out by Robert and Rachel Sargeant.
One of the things that stuck in my mind from my
