Inside the luxury car graveyard

At first this is a place that seems endlessly sad. You feel like tiptoeing around the wrecks, the vestiges of opulence and luxury reduced to rust and decay. How many dreams have ended here? But, actually, this is a story of resurrection, of recycling and redemption.

Flying Spares, in Nuneaton, has been breaking Rolls-Royce and Bentley models for over two decades. It’s an incongruous sight amid the new brick housing on a nondescript industrial estate, but if things go to plan the whole operation will shift to a new site where everything can be properly recorded digitally. At that point Flying Spares will be the largest Rolls-Royce and Bentley graveyard in the world.

Like most of these operations, it started with a couple, a Portakabin and a trailer, and that was it, breaking one car at a time. Now Ben and Lucy Handford oversee a £10m business.

Mostly now it’s 1970s and ‘80s Rollers and Bentleys, although you’ll also find the wrecks of crashed Continental GTs and Flying Spurs, testament to the fact that not all cars get to age gracefully into a rusty decline.

These are cars that are broken for spares, with about 70% of the business going abroad. But, while the Shadow II, Silver Shadow, Silver Cloud, Continental GT and others all take up much of your attention, breaking them down and recycling their working parts is only one part of the business.

Flying Spares also sells a lot of new items, either sourced directly from the Bentley and Rolls-Royce dealers or sourced from the suppliers that supply them. You can get an oil filter from the same company that supplies Bentley, but it won’t have Bentley on the box and it won’t cost as much either.

Yet another part of the business involves reconditioning. Given the glories of the cars, this can be a deeply rewarding – as well as profitable – operation. There’s a good market for the old 6.75-litre V8s that were the powerhouse of both Rolls-Royce and Bentley cars for so long. The surprise that most of the engines being rebuilt had done less than 100,000 miles, but were being initially scrapped.

The engines are so low-stressed and so wonderfully built, that they can go on for a very long time, but most owners simply haven’t done the miles before the rest of the car started to sag and fail – here’s an element where mileage counts, not the number of years, and here’s a beautiful subject for regular restoration.

Elsewhere there are miles of stock waiting for a new home, with here a stash of Rolls-Royce radiator grilles, there a gathering of Spirit of Ecstasy figures.

Given all this material, where does it all come from? Sometimes they’re failed restoration projects, or the loved car of someone who is deceased and their relatives want to get rid of it or sometimes it’s just a glorious car that has got to the stage where it’s not economical to repair it any more.

Ben Handford has to deduce, often over the phone, whether a car is worth buying in or not, with prices averaging around £1000 to £1500. Naturally, 20 years gives you a good nose for what’s good and what’s not.