In car terms, a legend was born in 1922 when a sixteen year old Turkish-born boy and his mother arrived in England for the first time. Life looked grim for the pair of them.The father had died on their journey here. And they were almost penniless. The father had been a marine engineer and, not unnaturally, the youngster decided to study to be an engineer too. He went to college, and a few years later he managed to get a job at the car manufacturer, Morris.

The lad's name was Alec Issigonis. By the early 1940s he was designing a new car for Morris. At the time, the entire design team consisted of Issigonis - who sketched drawings in freehand -and two draughtsmen who interpreted them. When the design was finished, myth has it that Lord Nuffield, aka William Morris, was aghast, dubbing it a poached egg. Luckily, his remarks were ignored. The car was the Morris Minor and, within twelve years, no fewer than one million units had been sold. Issigonis, incidentally, went on to design the Mini, but that's another story.

Now let's fast forward to today, a full half a century later. What have cars become? Efficient, comfortable and reliable. And very dull. If Issigonis was to look around car parks today, he would surely wonder why all new cars looked so similar, and insipid, and painted silver. We now live in a world of car blandness. Never has there been so much money spent on so many marketing campaigns pushing so many near-identical cars. So is all lost? Is the spirit of the Morris Minor dead? No. Today, moggies - their affectionate nickname - are highly sought after. Not only are they lovingly cared for but they are sometimes treated to the sort of refinement that would amaze you. Not convinced? Then you should do what we did. We climbed into the car you see in these photos, which looks, to all intents and purposes, like a lovingly cared-for Morris Minor Traveller. We fastened our seat belts. Swallowed hard. And had an experience that we will never forget the moment as long as we live. Try to imagine it. It's the world's most unassuming car. It's got a cute, rounded front, a cheerful face and a sturdy wooden frame. It's modest, loyal and chunky. It's the tail-wagging pet you pat as you walk past. If you're a country vet you pootle along country roads in it, flashing your lights at the vicar on his bicycle and stopping at the tea shop where Miss Marple is eating cake and listening out for clues.

You switch it on and drive off. Only something's very wrong. Instead of trundling along, you're accelerating like a rocket. You feel your chest compressing, preventing you from breathing. Your eyeballs finish up somewhere behind your head. This isn't funny. This is shocking. It's not so much a car-ride as a drag-race. If you had the presence of mind to time what's going on, you'd notice that you have gone from nought to sixty in six seconds and you're still accelerating like a missile. Now you're doing a hundred. Still accelerating. Help. A hundred and thirty. This is sheer madness. Is it a dream sequence? Your brain simply cannot comprehend it. You're in a Morris Minor Traveller, for heaven's sake. This is no moggie. Scalded cat, maybe.

Who's in charge of this beast? Meet Jonathon Heap, who has lovingly restored it for a client. Deep in his workshop in Leamington Spa, he spends his days turning Morris Minors and woodies - travellers - into what can only be described as fantasy machines.

The idea is to keep the exterior as close to the original design as possible, so nobody guesses what's special about it. Inside, there's a Rover 1.8 engine converted beyond recognition from 143 to 172 bhp. He adds a special suspension and a new chassis and a gearbox to match. Two hundred hours later,you finish up with a car that looks much like the car you started with. Until you drive it, when you feel like you're being blasted out of earth's gravity. In a Morris Minor.

This is all the very opposite of Go Faster stripes. Instead of having an ordinary car and pretending it's fast, you have a car that looks like one that Wallace and Gromit might drive.

 

If people notice you at all, they smile patronisingly at your painstakingly-restored old banger. You smile back. Why not? You can relax in the knowledge that from any traffic light on any road you could burn them away to hell and back, whoever they are. Not that you have to, of course. But you could if you wanted to. Nice thought.

It must be like being Clark Kent. You look harmless, even a bit dopey. You blend in. No-one would remember your face in a police line-up. You're the person who doesn't cause a fuss, always polite, considerate. But underneath your clothes is one Very Big Secret. You're really a superhero, capable of travelling faster than a bullet, righting wrongs and making BMWs look rather slow. It's rather appealing, don't you think?

And just put that car into the golf club car park. What kind of message is it sending out? If its driver joins you on the first tee and announces a handicap of twenty-one, put your money very quickly back into your pocket.

It may be that cars tell people who you are and, if that's true, then moggie owners evidently work very hard indeed to try to throw people completely off the scent. There are few external clues that give the game away. The exhaust, maybe. The alloy wheels. The slightly lower suspension. But who would spot these?

A true moggie fan would, such as our photographer. It turns out that he used to have a Morris Traveller in his youth, so it was something of an emotional event for him to be confronted by this godlike machine. The woodie of his student days had a dramatic end, we discovered. Preparing for a student birthday party, Simon was driving his Traveller fully laden with crates of Newcastle Brown on a country road. The front right tyre blew on a bend, and the car span out of control and rolled over. The roof finished up squashed onto the steering wheel, and he was trapped inside by old-style seat belts. But somehow his friends, who were following in another car, eventually extracted him and - amazingly - no-one was injured. Sadly, he had sold the car only the day before, so he had to give the buyer his fifty pound deposit back. Even more tragically, some of the beer was lost. These were students, remember.

The car in the photo has not had an event-free life, either. Having once been reconditioned and rebuilt by Jonathan some years ago, the proud owner was startled to see a GPO van come out of a side road one day and wrote it off. So Jonathan had to start all over again. Was the owner tempted to give up on it? Never.

Morris Minor owners treat them not as cars but as members of the family. We're talking about emotions, not objects. One client of Jonathan's was a country vet - exactly as you'd imagine - and she happily drove it for years, with Jonathan rebuilding it bit by bit. But it still had the old underpowered engine, and the problem was that yobbo car drivers couldn't resist overtaking her on reckless bends and cutting her up. Eventually she was persuaded to have a new engine, Jonathan-style. The vet loves it. Yobbos beware.

But not all his clients are straight out of central casting. A computer programmer, an electronics engineer, a German doctor and a retired RAF officer are on the list. It's hard to spot a trend there. Perhaps it's not a question of what they do for a living but how they view life. These are not ostentatious people, clearly. Perhaps you can recognise them only for their subtle smile, a confident radiance that says, 'I have a Little Secret and you don't know what it is.

You might never discover it, which is fine, but if the mood takes me I can draw on my Reserves of Unlimited Power and blow you away into the dust.' Good. I like that. It's all rather like the tale of the ugly duckling. There's an entire movie genre dedicated to the concept of the female lead spending the first half of the movie with a bad hair do and wearing ill-advised glasses. Then she gets the chance to marry a millionaire, so she does the equivalent of visiting Trinny and Susannah and - voila - the removal of spectacles actually triggers off wedding bells. The problem with these tales is that the actress obviously looked like a glamorous person in poor disguise all along. You see the punchline a mile off.

Not so our Jonathan-inspired moggies. From now on, if you're ever ambling along a country lane and you see a Morris Minor Traveller a mile off I recommend that you jump into a nearby hedge right away.You don't have a second to lose. WG