A brief history of Burlington Motor Company of Leamington Spa
written by its founder Haydn Davies
I have always had an interest in home-built cars and in the mid/late 1970s there was an upsurge in companies building kits for such things and, the more I looked at the available kits, the more I thought “I could do that.(and better…)”
I rented a lock-up garage in Kenilworth, purchased a Triumph Herald, removed the original body and started to think about what I would do with the remaining chassis and running gear.
1930s style kits were popular and easy to design and build and I discovered that it was possible to purchase Morgan fiberglass wings and radiator surround from certain genuine Morgan dealers, so I purchased a set and then made what was basically a wooden box to fit the wings to. I did not set out to design a copy of the Morgan, as some people have suggested, even though it would have been easy to do so. I simply designed a wooden box that Morgan parts could fit onto. Once I’d decided that the car looked OK and had worked out that it was worth having a go at making it a commercial possibility I needed a name for the company.
One day, while walking down Leam Terrace (or was it Bertie Terrace?) I noticed a building with the name “Burlington House”. The name “Burlington” seemed to fit the looks of the car and so I formed “The Burlington Motor Company”, called the car “The Burlington SS” (Sports Special) and found a vacant railway arch in Bath Place for my “Factory”. This was about 1980.
The first advertisement for the Burlington SS
The Burlington SS
Much to my amazement the kits started to sell as soon as the first adverts went into the Kit Car magazines and within a few months I had a waiting list of three months even though I was making 2 kits a week. It got to the stage that I was working 7 days a week 16 hours a day and got production up to 3 kits a week for a short while. Orders came in from all over the UK plus one or two a month from Europe. I eventually had to rent another railway arch in the row of arches just for storage space.
After about a year things calmed down a bit and I was able to develop a new model, the Burlington Arrow.
The Burlington Arrow
I’d had the idea of rather than selling a kit, I’d simply sell a set of plans so that a would be car builder could actually make 95% of the parts themselves.
It was mainly plywood and simple metalwork. There were a couple of fiberglass parts that I sold (a scuttle and a radiator surround) but even these could be home-made if the builder had the skill to do it . The idea was a resounding success with about 3000 sets of 80 page plans sold in the first year of publication. (I think at about £15 per set)
As time went on I supplied more and more parts as some customers still preferred to get the car as a part kit, but even then most customers still made 50% of the parts themselves. As well as the saving in cost, it enabled the customer to personalize the design of the car. They did not have to rely on building it exactly as the manufacturer told then to do.
After about a year I modified the Arrow and supplied a set of full flowing wings (Modified MG TD wings to be accurate) and named the new model the “Burlington Berretta” (Note the spelling “Berretta” with 2 “R”s to stop any copyright issue from the gun manufacturer.)
The Burlington Berretta
About this time I also sold off the Burlington SS project to a new company called “Burlington Motor Spares Ltd”. This was wholly owned by other people, my only connection was that I received a royalty on each kit sold for the use of the name “Burlington SS”.
Meanwhile the sale of Burlington Arrow plans and parts ticked over at a reasonable rate.
Bath Place was never the most salubrious of areas in Leamington and one day one of the many vagrants that frequented the area came begging for money . I politely told him he could not have any and he wandered away. About 2 weeks later my business was set on fire and the entire arch was gutted.
The police had an idea about who was responsible, (the man who came asking for money) but the person was never located, other crimes were deemed more important, and no one was ever brought to justice.
Obviously this was a bit of a blow, but I managed to salvage what I could and within a couple of weeks I slowly got the business back up and running. However I never really felt safe in Bath Place any more and within 3 months I moved my home to Northampton, and ran the Burlington Arrow business from the garage.
By this time all the parts I was selling were manufactured by outside contractors so all I needed was space for storage.
So that was the end of the Burlington saga in Leamington.
Business eventually dwindled to the point that I decided to sell all the rights to the Arrow and Berretta in early 2024.
The new owner hopes to redevelop the design to utilize more modern donor running gear.
Some Burlington Car Company facts:
Started designing in lock-up garage, Kenilworth, 1977.
Started manufacturing kits in Bath Place Railway Arch 39M 1980.
Left Bath Place in 1988.
Total number of SS kits built in Bath Place 120.
Total number of Arrow/Berretta plans sold 6000+.
Total number of Arrow/Berretta cars built 500 (Based on parts [Chassis and panels] sold and number of people in the owner’s club in the 1990’s. – There were about 150 people in the club, but I estimated only about 25% of owners would bother to join the club.)
Total number of employees (other than myself), 1 (Part time.)
Haydn Davies, August 2024