I often hear them before I see them: the squeal of tyres in a suburban street; the frantic revving in a motorway tunnel. Then the modified cars appear. Not uncommonly, they proceed to do something obnoxious. One strange-looking grey Audi overtakes me on the right, then quickly turns left, trailing a Victorian quantity of smoke.
A modified car is an ordinary factory-built car that someone has altered, usually after buying it second- or third-hand. It is likely to be set close to the ground. It might have new, eye-catching wheels, a wide exhaust pipe, special lights, racing pedals, an upgraded sound system, or any number of other wild and wonderful adjustments.
Ask the driver of a highly modified vehicle how it has been altered and, unless you know a great deal about cars, your head will spin. At one gathering of petrolheads in Bradford, I spot a beautiful blue Opel. I ask the owner, a beanie-hatted mechanic, what he has done to his car. His answer is so quick and complicated that I capture only a small fraction of his words: “rods and pistons”, “valve springs”, and “anti-roll bar”. Then, more slowly, he explains the point of his labours. He has turned an old, modestly priced car into a powerful machine that turns people’s heads. He calls it “a sports car for the working class”.
Nobody knows how many Britons modify their cars. I would make a very rough guess that between one in every 50 and one in every 150 cars has been substantially altered. In some places around the UK, the share is higher. I am always a little surprised when I see a modified car parked in an affluent urban neighbourhood. I am never surprised to see one parked in a suburban council estate or a seaside town that has seen better days.
This being Britain, many sports and leisure activities bear social-class labels. Snooker, darts, boxing, greyhound racing, punk rock and bingo have different social connotations from cricket, sailing, fly fishing, dressage and jazz. Car modification is a largely working-class activity, and often a white working-class one. It thrives in places with poor public transport, quiet roads and plentiful parking spaces — in suburbs and small towns rather than inner-city neighbourhoods.
The culture is especially strong in working-class places that have a bit of money. One of Britain’s most enduring modified-car scenes is in Aberdeen, a Scottish city with good manual jobs in the oil-and-gas industry. Another is on the Essex coast. And I have never seen so many modified cars anywhere as I have in the Medway towns of Kent, east of London. That area is working class, but not poor.
Car modification provides a rare opportunity for white working-class Britons to flaunt their artistry and skill, and lord it over everyone else. Most of the car modifiers who I’ve met are skilled manual workers or clerical workers. Many of the men are mechanics, or do jobs that are somehow linked to vehicles. A driver of a modified Ford Focus installs bollards for a living; another man, who has lovingly altered a Renault 5, is a joiner.
All are enthusiastic about meddling with cars, bordering on obsessive. When talking about their hobby, they use words like “addiction” and “hooked”. When they have changed one car to their satisfaction, they are likely to sell it and buy another to work on — for fun, not because it brings in any money. The joiner thinks he has owned nine cars, an impressive total given that he is only 22. Another man, who is not much older, reckons he has owned 20.
The wildest years of the modified-car era appear to be behind us. In the late Nineties, enthusiasts suddenly began to hold enormous “cruises” in suburban retail parks and seaside towns. At one point, 2,000 vehicles turned up in Bristol. Drivers did “burn-outs” (spinning the wheels while remaining stationary, which creates smoke) and “doughnuts” (rotating one end of the car around the other while spinning the wheels), leaving black marks on the tarmac.
“Car modification provides a rare opportunity for white working-class Britons to flaunt their artistry and skill, and lord it over everyone else.“
Several things caused that acceleration. Cars became cheaper around the turn of the century, and credit more accessible. In 2001, Universal Pictures released The Fast and the Furious. But the crucial factor in Britain was a magazine, Max Power, which helped to define a cheap and cheeky British approach to car modification that was different from the glamorous scene portrayed in The Fast and the Furious. “It was often silly. Let’s have a bonnet that opens the wrong way! Let’s put Jaguar lights on a Corsa!” says James Burr, known as Midge, a mechanic and a veteran of the car scene.
The March 1997 issue of Max Power encapsulated the spirit of the time. Reporting on a cruise in Chesterfield, south of Sheffield, the magazine printed lots of pictures of burnouts, men admiring each other’s cars, and a woman flashing her bra. It noted with a twinge of disappointment that no “rozzers”, or police, had turned up to shut down the gathering. Max Power went on to cover many other cruises and car meets. It was soon scoring them according to fixed criteria: “motors”, “burnouts”, “rozzers”, (men’s) “arses”, and “birds”. The magazine was not just reporting on the modified-car scene: it was shaping it.
It seemed at the time as though the wheels would never stop spinning. And yet, within a few years, they almost did. Max Power ceased regular publication in 2011. And the big, unruly cruises ceased. There were several reasons for this. The police became cleverer and more powerful, because Parliament gave them powerful legal weapons to stop cruises. The actor Sacha Baron Cohen ridiculed the scene. In Ali G Indahouse, the gormless white rapper drove a heavily modified, bright yellow Renault 5 GT around the safe suburban streets of Surrey, blasting drum and bass. It was a devastating joke, cruelly deflating the fantasy that your souped-up Vauxhall Corsa made you look like a Hollywood star.
Cars became harder to alter: vehicles were increasingly controlled by computers and required the attention of qualified mechanics. Insurance companies insisted on being informed of even minor adjustments, and sometimes refused to cover modified cars altogether. In 2009, the government launched a scrappage scheme, which eradicated many of the older, cheaper cars that modifiers loved to work on. A proud culture became an endangered subculture.
The assault on car modifiers sometimes looks to me like an attempt to put young working-class people in their place. All enthusiasts, even responsible ones, were labelled “boy racers” — a term that originally meant a dangerous driver. In Aberdeen, a long-established, largely working-class group of car cruisers known as the “Bouley Bashers” came under sustained pressure from the authorities when their gathering spot became more middle class.
But the modified-car scene was not completely crushed. It flourishes today, although fashions have changed. Modified cars tend to look more modest than they did two decades ago, partly because a modern car needs less alteration to make it look good. On the other hand, modified cars sound a lot less modest. Many people pay mechanics to retune their engines so they produce “pops and bangs”, which annoy pedestrians and even some other car modifiers. “If you spend £40,000, you can make your whole car explode,” one weary petrolhead told me at a car meet.
Local authorities and the police rarely welcomed gatherings of modified-car enthusiasts, and the pops and bangs have given them another reason to detest them. It is hard to organise a meet these days. In the Max Power era, you could put the word out via text messages and cruise websites and not bother obtaining permission. Try that today, and you would be met with a barricaded car park, a line of police vehicles and perhaps an exclusion order. Some car groups have resorted to releasing locations at the last minute and hoping for the best; others obtain permission for their meets, try to persuade burger vans and other retailers to attend, deal politely with the police, and attempt to impose some order on the proceedings.
The other big difference between the Max Power era and today is the role of women. For years, a woman’s allotted role at a modified-car meet was to sit in the passenger seat and to pose for magazine photographers, wearing as little clothing as possible. The culture was overwhelmingly male, and frequently sexist. Now, however, some of the most successful car clubs in England are run by women.
I have described car modification as a facet of white British working-class culture. It still is, but it is growing increasingly ethnically diverse. I have yet to attend a modified-car meet or a car show where no British Asians have been present. Car modification is especially popular among working-class Asian Muslims — as one Muslim man explains to me at a car meet: “We can’t go clubbing; we can’t drink. What else are we going to spend our money on?”
The car meet where I spot the blue Opel has been organised by Bradford Modified Club. It takes place in Manningham, just up the road from Bradford Central Mosque — the very heart of Pakistani Bradford. The event is billed as an “Eid Extravaganza”. Not surprisingly, the crowd is mostly Asian. But white men and women have also turned up to show off their cars and admire other people’s.
Such harmonious scenes aren’t often associated with Bradford — the city where, in July 2001, white and Asian youths violently confronted each other and the police. Manningham Ward Labour Club was firebombed; businesses were attacked; many police officers were injured. Afterwards, an official investigation led by Ted Cantle, formerly the chief executive of Nottingham City Council, concluded that whites and Asians were living “parallel lives” in Bradford and other northern cities. Cantle’s report argued for more diversity training and a string of rather worthy measures to reduce cultural segregation. It did not anticipate that working-class Asian and white people might find common ground in their love of alloy wheels, enormous spoilers and pop-and-bang remaps. Yet, that is what has happened.
British white working-class culture is often described in terms of loss. And some things, like miners’ welfare institutes, have indeed been lost. Car modification is an important exception. Not only is it thriving; it has expanded socially. Women and ethnic-minority Britons have found ways into the culture, and strengthened it. The modified-car scene should really be celebrated as a great British cultural creation. And what do the authorities do about this scene? Naturally, they try to shut it down.
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This is an edited extract from Joel Budd’s Underdogs: The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class, which is published today.
