UNLIKE many of the other Land Rover projects that grace the pages of Land Rover Monthly, the Defender 90 you see before you wasn’t dragged kicking and screaming from a hedge, rescued from the scrapyard’s crusher or brought back from the brink of extinction with a pair of vice grips and a box of welding rods. “We spotted it on Auto Trader. It’s an ex-RAF runway vehicle, and when it left the services it got bought by a fellow enthusiast, so it was actually in fantastic condition when we went up to Newark to buy it,” enthuses Miles Stephenson, who’s responsible for this now stunning 90, along with his brother, James.
“We cruised back down to Dorset in awe of how sweetly it drove; it really is a credit to its previous owner. He’d spent far more on the Defender over the years he’d had it than it was worth, really.” So why did it need eight months of evenings and weekends pouring into it, then? “It was just… ugly! I used it to commute to London for a while, and the times I’d normally beam with pride when catching the reflection of my Land Rover in a glass-fronted building, the look of it just made me sink into the seat. We had to do something about it.”
Miles, an historic building specialist, is no stranger to Land Rovers, having owned 20-odd
