Ford of Britain: The Company That Conquered the Suburbs

Every successful invasion understands something the natives don't about their own country. The Romans arrived and knew Britain needed roads and proper heating. The Normans turned up and knew it needed castles and someone to write down who owned what. In 1911, Henry Ford's people arrived with a simpler insight: Britain had millions of people who needed transport but had been overlooked by an industry that only built for the extremes, magnificent leaky sports cars for gentlemen who enjoyed mechanical temperament, or cramped rattling boxes for workers who couldn't afford anything better. The vast middle ground, the clerks and shop managers and travelling salesmen, had been completely ignored, which struck the Americans as an extraordinary business opportunity.

By the 1970s, Ford was building nearly a third of all cars sold in Britain. The vehicle that sat on more driveways in Surbiton and Solihull than any other wore a blue oval badge from Detroit, and nobody seemed particularly embarrassed about this. Ford had done something rather remarkable - it had created the entire concept of the modern British family car, and in doing so had become more British than the actual British companies.

The Racing Driver Who Spotted the Gap

The man who made this happen was Sir Percival Perry, a dapper racing driver who was equally interested in speed and commerce. In 1906, he sailed to Detroit to meet Henry Ford, carrying with him a straightforward observation about the British market. Britain's car industry catered to two groups and ignored everyone else. At the top, you had expensive sports cars for gentlemen who treated mechanical maintenance as part of the ownership experience. At the bottom, cheap basic transport for workers. In between sat an entire class of people with money who wanted personal transport but had absolutely no interest in valve adjustment or the social theatre of car ownership.

Perry convinced Ford that this overlooked middle represented a fortune waiting to be made. In 1911, Ford opened a factory in a former tram works in Trafford Park, Manchester, and began assembling Model Ts from American-made parts. The cars cost £135, which was considerably less than the £200-plus you'd pay for a comparable British car. The response from the British establishment was magnificently predictable: they declared the Model T vulgar and suitable only for tradesmen, then proceeded to buy thousands of them anyway. By 1913, Ford was outselling every native manufacturer. Vulgarity, apparently, was only a concern when other people were doing the buying.

Twenty years later, while Britain's economy was collapsing and car firms were either going bankrupt or merging with each other in increasingly desperate arrangements, Perry convinced Ford to spend £3 million building a proper factory at Dagenham. This wasn't just a car plant cobbled together from existing buildings. When it opened in 1931, Dagenham was a complete industrial operation employing 30,000 people at its peak, with its own steelworks, power station, and foundry. Raw materials went in one end, finished cars came out the other. British car companies made cars. Ford had built what amounted to a small industrial nation that happened to manufacture transport. When war arrived in 1939, this arrangement proved rather convenient, and questions about American ownership became distinctly impolite, particularly when Dagenham's facilities were keeping the RAF's airplanes flying.

The Disgraced Designer's Second Chance

By the late 1950s, Ford faced a new problem. It dominated fleet sales and had conquered the practical end of the market, but everything it sold looked relentlessly sensible and slightly old-fashioned. The company needed something modern that would appeal to younger buyers who had money to spend and no particular loyalty to their father's generation of cars. In 1959, Patrick Hennessy commissioned Project Archbishop, deploying Critical Path Analysis to treat every deadline from initial design to final production as equally critical. The British establishment's approach had always been to design something brilliant first, then worry about whether you could actually build it afterwards. Ford worked backwards from what people needed and when they needed it by.

The designer they got was Roy Brown Jr.. Brown had created the Edsel for Ford's American operation, a car so spectacularly unpopular that its name became permanently attached to the concept of commercial disaster. Nobody else particularly wanted him after that, so Dagenham got him by default, which turned out to be one of those fortunate accidents that turned things around

What Brown designed in exile was the Cortina. It cost £573, looked handsome without trying too hard, and came in enough different versions that it could be whatever you needed it to be. Fleet managers bought the stripped-out basic model. Young men bought the GT and pretended they were racing drivers. Suburbanites bought the 1600E with its fake wood trim and velour seats. Between 1962 and 1982, Ford sold 2.6 million Cortinas in Britain. For two entire decades, it was simply what ordinary people drove, which is both the car's greatest success and its epitaph. The Cortina was so perfectly ordinary that it became invisible, which meant it was everywhere.

This created an unexpected problem. Ford had become so thoroughly associated with sensible, reliable transport that it was commercial death for anyone under forty. Walter Hayes, who'd been a journalist at the Daily Mail before joining Ford in 1962, understood that racing success sold ordinary saloons to people who would never race anything themselves. His timing was perfect. Britain's youth had disposable income for the first time in living memory and wanted something that looked exciting, even if it was actually just a Cortina underneath.

Selling Dreams Wrapped in Sheet Metal

Hayes's masterstroke arrived in 1969 with the Capri and one of the great advertising taglines: "The Car You Always Promised Yourself." It looked like an American Mustang but cost what you'd pay for a well-equipped Cortina, which meant ordinary people could afford something that appeared expensive and exciting. The car appeared in every successful television show of the era, usually being driven by someone who looked good in a leather jacket. Britain bought them in enormous numbers, which confirmed that if a car looked exciting, people stopped worrying about whether it was actually practical or fast.

Hayes also established Advanced Vehicle Operations at Aveley in 1970, a factory within a factory that hand-built performance Escorts properly. They used reinforced bodyshells and lifted engines into place with jacks rather than dropping bodies onto mechanicals. These were the actual cars that won actual rallies: the Twin Cam, the RS1600, the Mexico named after Ford's victory in the London-Mexico rally, the RS2000. Meanwhile, Hayes convinced Ford to fund the Cosworth DFV engine and sign Jackie Stewart, which meant Ford's name was attached to nearly every Formula One victory throughout the 1970s.

The effect was remarkable. The company your father drove to the office every morning was suddenly winning everything that mattered. Britain claimed Ford's racing victories as its own, conveniently forgetting the American ownership whenever there were championships to celebrate. It's an old lesson that every occupying force eventually learns: locals accept you much faster when you give them something to be proud of, particularly when they can claim that success as fundamentally theirs.

When the Workers Fought Back

Of course, those championship-winning racing cars were being built in factories where industrial relations ranged from difficult to appalling. The most significant dispute began on 7 June 1968, when 187 women walked out of Dagenham. They were sewing machinists making car seat covers, recently reclassified by Ford's management as "unskilled" workers despite the fact that teenage boys were earning more for sweeping floors with brooms. 

Rose Boland, Eileen Pullen, Vera Sime, Gwen Davis, Violet Dawson, and Sheila Douglass led a strike that cost Ford $8 million in lost export orders and put 5,000 men out of work. When photographers arrived to document the protest, the women unfurled a banner reading "We want sex equality," except it caught halfway and the image that went everywhere showed just "We want sex." This probably tells you something about how seriously their actual demand was initially taken by the press and management. What they wanted was equal pay for equal work, which seemed reasonable to everyone except the people who'd have to pay it.

The strike led directly to the 1970 Equal Pay Act, though the women themselves had to wait until 1984 to achieve actual parity with male workers doing comparable jobs. Ford's racing programme and marketing genius were consistently undermined by what actually rolled off the production lines and by the fundamental hostility between American management expecting efficiency and British workers expecting to be treated with basic respect. The 1978 strike that collapsed Labour's incomes policy was simply the most spectacular and public example of this ongoing tension. The workers had discovered they could disrupt the occupiers' plans whenever the relationship became intolerable, which turned out to be fairly frequently.

The Car Britain Rejected Until It Didn't

The Cortina's replacement arrived in 1982, and Ford's designers had created something genuinely modern. The Sierra was aerodynamic where the Cortina had been boxy, it handled properly where the Cortina had wallowed, it was built to higher standards. British buyers took one look at it, declared it a "jellymould," and refused to buy it. They wanted another Cortina, which was precisely what Ford couldn't give them if it wanted to remain competitive with European manufacturers who'd spent the previous decade investing in wind tunnels and proper suspension design.

Ford waited them out. Eventually people came round, helped considerably by Ford adding the Cosworth version with its enormous whale tail spoiler that won touring car championships and made the standard Sierra seem more acceptable by association. If the fast one looked good winning races, the slow ones must be acceptable for driving to Tesco. But by then, Ford was changing in more fundamental ways. Dagenham and Halewood looked increasingly expensive compared to modern plants in Germany and Spain where workers struck less frequently and efficiency was higher. The deep roots in British manufacturing culture that had once made Ford seem authentically local were now making it uncompetitive.

The retreat happened gradually but inexorably. Halewood was sold and became home to Jaguar Land Rover. Dagenham's main assembly line stopped producing complete cars in 2002, though the plant continues building engines. The last Transit van rolled out of Southampton in 2013, ending Ford's vehicle manufacturing in Britain after 102 years of continuous production. Britain's most successful automotive brand now sells vehicles built in other people's countries.

The Invasion That Became Invisible

The Romans eventually left Britain, taking their roads and central heating with them, leaving the natives to work out how to maintain civilisation without anyone in charge. The Normans stayed but gradually stopped being Norman until nobody could quite remember who'd conquered whom or when it had happened. Ford managed something rather different.

Three generations learned to drive in Cortinas and went on holiday in Escorts and drove to work in Fiestas. Their children now buy Pumas - Britain's bestselling car in 2025 - built in Romania without questioning where they're made or whether that matters. The blue oval is as British as queuing or apologising when someone else bumps into you. Ford became so thoroughly woven into ordinary life that its foreign ownership is simply irrelevant, which is rather the point. It understood the suburban middle better than British companies did, built cars for them for eight decades, then quietly moved production somewhere cheaper while continuing to sell the same idea back to the same people. The factories are gone. The brand remains, and Britain still thinks of Ford as one of its own. The occupation continues, just with a different supply chain.