Move over Rolls-Royce. Take a hike Bentley. The “best car in England” is back at last.

In the film ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’, one of the characters teaches a schoolboy a mantra they share whenever they meet: “Alvis, the best motorcar in England!”. The film may have been set in the early 1970s, but it’s perhaps an indication of just how quickly the British car industry went into decline that hardly anyone has heard of Alvis these days – even though it was the choice of the fighter ace Douglas Bader, the composer Benjamin Britten and the Duke of Edinburgh. 

It was Alvis who invented front-wheel drive cars and independent front suspension. An Alvis was, in a way, the cool alternative to the Rolls-Royce or Bentley, and just as expensive.

Sadly, that hasn’t changed: an Alvis will set you back upwards of £300,000, in no small part because it’s exemplary of the fine art of coach-building – providing an engineering platform onto which a body as unique and fantastic as you can imagine can be built.

But the good news is that you can at least think of what it would be like to buy one again. That’s down to Alan Stote – car parts entrepreneur, car collector and Alvis fan-boy. He knew that Alvis had stopped building cars in 1967, even if the Midlands-based company still existed to service the few Alvis cars around. It was when he visited the company that he discovered that its entire archive was still intact, including 25,000 engineering drawings and many pristine parts – including complete, unused engines – dating to the 1930s. And it’s then that he had an idea: start making Alvis cars again, to order. 

It’s as though the company just too a rather long break and is now back doing what it should be. The results are, frankly, some of the most lovingly built and most spectacular cars you’re ever likely to see too: the Art Deco-period Bertelli Sports Coupe, Lancefield Concealed Hood, through to the mid-60s Park Ward Drop Head Coupe and – Alvis’ latest car to be delivered, earlier this year – the utterly gorgeous Graber Cabriolet. 

Don’t, however, expect these to come with lots of LED lighting and fancy head-up displays. These cars are hand-built to the original spec, a time when “cars were really cars”, as Stote puts it. And, he adds, “you’re never likely to go somewhere and see a line of Alvises. Every one is unique to the owner”.