A Sunny Morning Among DeLoreans, Triumphs and Boris the Morris

Cirencester Market Place filled with classic cars, sunshine, live music and one very memorable Morris Minor van.

On Sunday, Cirencester Market Place turned into something it does not usually look like.

The everyday run of parked cars, pushchairs and shopping bags gave way to rows of classics, lined up nose to tail in the sunshine. Owners sat beside them in fold-out chairs, happy to talk to anyone who stopped. Families wandered between the cars with coffees and ice creams, children pointed at anything with unusual doors, dogs waited patiently on leads, and grandparents settled in for the afternoon.

It was Father's Day, it was Midsummer, and the Cirencester Car Show had filled the square in front of the Parish Church for the third year running.

I had only meant to stop for a look.

I stayed much longer than planned.

That is easily done when an event is free, the weather is behaving itself, and someone has parked a DeLorean outside St John the Baptist.

One quick confession before we go any further: I am no expert on makes and models, and I am working from memory and a stack of photos taken in a crowd. So if I have got a badge, year or variant slightly wrong, take it in the spirit it is meant. I knew what I liked when I saw it.

The DeLorean was the car that did it for me, and for half the crowd by the look of it. It was parked right against the church with both gull-wing doors raised and an OUTATIME plate on the front, pulling a crowd that barely moved all morning.

I am not immune to it.

That was the car we all wanted as kids. The one from Back to the Future. The one that made you think stainless steel, strange doors and wildly impractical dreams were all completely reasonable things to want in life.

Seeing one in the flesh, parked against Cotswold stone in the middle of Cirencester, took me straight back. There is something about those doors going up that no amount of growing up quite cancels out.

Next to it sat a pale yellow 1958 Corvette convertible on whitewall tyres, looking as if it had driven off an American forecourt and accidentally parked itself in Gloucestershire. The two of them together, with the church behind them, made probably the best corner of the whole show.

Further along was a car for anyone who cares more about rarity than film nostalgia.

A red Lancia Stratos sat low and purposeful, the proper wedge-shaped rally weapon from the seventies. It looked tiny, sharp, and faintly dangerous in the best possible way. You do not see those often, and certainly not casually parked in a market square while people queue for coffee nearby.

At the other end of the timeline was a vintage FIAT racing car, all chain drive, brass and exposed mechanics. It looked less like something you would drive down a road and more like a piece of industrial sculpture that had somehow learned to move.

That was one of the joys of the morning. You could go from childhood film poster to rally legend to pre-war engineering in the space of a few steps.

The British sports cars were out in force too, which felt right for a Cotswold market town.

There were Triumphs everywhere, from a green TR4 with a hardtop to red TR6s and Spitfires dotted around the square. The MGs had turned up properly too, including a bright orange MGB GT, a pale yellow GT with its bonnet raised, and a deep blue MGB roadster with a wicker picnic basket strapped to the boot.

Which, frankly, is exactly the correct way to arrive at a car show.

The quieter pleasures were the bigger saloons. A powder blue Jaguar Mk2. A maroon Jaguar XJ with cream leather and walnut inside. A couple of Humber Super Snipes. A black Vauxhall Viscount with a gold pinstripe. Cars from a time when dashboards looked like furniture and the word “presence” was doing a lot of work.

There were Minis tucked around the square too, and an Austin 1800, the one everyone calls the Landcrab, sat nearby looking exactly as solid as the nickname suggests.

Then there were the oddities, which are often what make a show like this worth wandering slowly.

A red split-screen VW camper. A cream Beetle. A purple Hawke kit-car roadster with its spare wheel mounted on the back. A racing-liveried Mazda MX-5. A yellow Porsche 911. A red Ford GT40 replica sitting low and aggressive with its doors up and a black Ford Escort rally car with Goodwood and Lombard Rally stickers in the window.

And then there was Boris the Morris.

A green Morris Minor van, at first glance charming enough on its own, turned out to have one of the best stories of the day.

According to the history sheet in the windscreen, it is a genuine ex-prison van, one of around sixty used by HM Prison Service. It spent six years at Corby Prison, covering 51,000 miles on light duties, and is now one of only three known survivors.

It was found in a Suffolk barn in 2005 by a man called Malcolm Dowie, who recommissioned it as a daily driver for his wife, Rose. Malcolm had learned the bagpipes at fourteen, played in the Scots Guards regimental pipe band, and later trained as a silversmith. He died in 2013. Rose kept the van until 2018, and it now belongs to its sixth owner, who still uses it and has kept the name Malcolm and Rose gave it.

Boris the Morris.

You do not get that from a spec sheet.

Food and coffee were sorted by two vintage Citroën H vans, which felt entirely appropriate. The Cafeteria, a pale green one with order-here and pick-up-here hatches, kept the coffees moving all morning. Burgerlish was turning out burgers, hot dogs and vegan options to a steady stream of families.

There was live music from Adam Okin through the afternoon, and enough going on that the event never felt like it was only for car people. That is probably why it worked so well. You could admire the engineering, indulge in a bit of nostalgia, or simply wander through town and enjoy the fact that the town looked completely different for a few hours.

St John the Baptist makes an unusually good backdrop for this sort of thing. There are grander venues for a car show, but few where the setting does so much of the work without trying. Sunlight on the stone. Classic cars in front of the church. People drifting between them with coffee, ice cream and the occasional “my dad had one of those.”

The show is co-run with Cirencester Town Council and raises money for Cirencester Hospital League of Friends, who are currently fundraising for emergency lifting equipment at the local hospital. Getting your own car into the show costs £10 for charity. Turning up to enjoy it costs nothing.

On a sunny Father's Day, with the church glowing behind the cars and the Market Place full of people lingering longer than they meant to, it felt like exactly the sort of local event Cirencester does best.

And yes, I will absolutely be back next time the Market Place fills up like this.