The Jaguar Heritage collection is parting with dozens of oddball classics

The Jaguar Land Rover collection is parting with a few dozen cars from its vault, a rare event in itself and one which presents collectors from all over the world with the opportunity to purchase some even rarer machinery. Even though the cars hail from JLR's Heritage Collection, none that will be offered for sale actually belong to these two marques. Rather, JLR is getting rid of some vehicles from the James Hull Collection.

Maybe you heard of the James Hull Collection a few years ago, in 2014, when Jaguar Land Rover purchased what was the biggest private collection of British cars at the time -- it numbered 543 cars, 130 of which were Jaguars. This substantial trove, one of the biggest in the world and dwarfing many a car museum, the Hull Collection comprised many original examples of ordinary cars and many quite extraordinary ones.

"Traveling all over the world to build the collection over the years has been a labor of love and a life’s work,” Dr. James Hull said when the collection was sold to Jaguar Land Rover. "My primary motivation was to secure the future of the collection in this country. … They are the perfect custodians to take the collection forward, and I know it is in safe hands."
 

Jaguar, of course, is keeping all the Jags, so cars that the automaker will part with are of the ordinary variety, or at least they were for the time. Many of these are as rare as hens' teeth because they were just regular family cars, and many simply were not intentionally preserved.

This makes the roster of the Hull Collection a trip in a time machine to the streets of London, from the 1960s through the 1990s -- cars that one would have a hard time spotting street-parked in the U.K. today.

We're talking everything from a 1968 Ford Transit van to a 1990 FSO 125P estate. It's hard to find an "average" car from this batch -- it's just that eclectic -- but if you've been in the market for an MG Metro from the mid-1980s all this time and want something with the provenance of a major collection, this auction will have more than a few Metros you can bid on. Fans of old Morrises, Leylands, Vauxhalls and Europeans Fords will want to pay attention and look under all the couch cushions over the next few weeks, because this collection will have things they'll want to bid on.

The Brightwells auction house will offer dozens of cars from the Hull Collection on March 21. View the full list of lots and the auction schedule here.