SEEING GHOSTS

City centres were once full of prestige car dealers. Hard to picture? Not so, thanks to one enthusiast in 1980s Edinburgh. Richard Webber joins him down memory lane

- Richard Webber

We’re staring at the fire escape of a Mexican restaurant, wondering how the bulging hips of a 930-generation Porsche 911 Turbo could squeeze through it. It’s May 2022 and we’re on George Street, central Edinburgh’s smartest strip, but our minds are 40 years behind when this site was the Glen Henderson Porsche showroom.

Before being uprooted miles out of town, prestige car dealers like Glen Henderson were dotted all around the heart of the city, peacocking on grand streets and tucked away in hidden mews. Perhaps excepting London, this is a story repeated across the UK.

But thanks to David Whitton, an amateur photographer from West Lothian, we needn’t only imagine those lost treasures. As a teenager in the 1980s, inspired by car magazine snappers of the day, Whitton and his 35mm Canon AE1 went on “lurking safaris” about town, inveigling their way into showrooms and service centers to capture the kind of automotive exotica that has since become legend.

With his scrapbook for a wormhole, Whitton is here with me and Autocar staff photographer Max Edleston to retrace his steps.

In 1982, Porsche was deep in transaxle territory with 924, 928, and 944. The ‘basic’ 911 was the SC (Super Carrera), the 930’s whale tail had deepened into a tea tray and Derek Bell and Jacky Ickx led all three 956s onto the podium at Le Mans.

After the pinstriped salesmen on George Street’s cosy three-car showroom turned Whitton away, he found a far greater cache down the hill on Belford Road at Glen Henderson’s service centre.