Richard Usher CEO, Great British Car Journey

From selling windscreens to building Blyton Park, Richard Usher shares the story of his truly unique career with cars

- JOHN BARKER

A LIST OF THE CARS THAT RICHARD USHER A owns would fill a fair chunk of this article.

The 65-year-old runs the Great British Car Journey, which tells the story of the British car industry, and its protagonists, through ordinary cars, the ones built in volume. There are currently around 150 cars in the collection and Usher owns 'fewer than half of them.

The car that sowed the idea of the museum was a wonderfully preserved, base-spec Austin Maestro, a car that managed to pull together a number of threads woven into Usher's life. That was about ten years ago when he was running Blyton Park, the circuit he'd created near Gainsborough in Lincolnshire.

'There was this dear old boy in the village who used to come up every day and he made the mistake of telling me about his Maestro,' recalls Usher. To most people, this would be a mildly interesting aside, but to Usher, who had been sales and marketing director of Auto Windscreens, it tripped a memory.

'The Maestro was one of the first volume cars with a glued-in screen, which was a complete game changer; we had to completely reinvent the business around this new mode of the fitting. And it got me thinking: when was the last time I saw a Maestro? It started this fascination with the industry. I did history at Oxford and the historian in me that had been latent for 40 years came back.

Usher was born in 1957 and cars were a feature in his life from the start. 'Dad was a terrific car enthusiast, drove my mother absolutely crackers. They were saving for a house when his father spent £100 on a vintage Bentley. 'He continued to buy totally unsuitable cars for the rest of his life.'

The family business, in Birmingham, was originally jewellery but after the First World War switched to being an early motor factoring business called