How to open your own car museum

So, you want to start a car museum. You will need some cars and a place to put them. You will also need deep pockets. Above all, you will need a vision and a cast-iron determination to achieve your goal.

In short, you will need to be like Pat Hawkins. The 62-year-old has a light in his eyes that not even a brush with death could extinguish.

It was six years ago. He had been rushed to hospital, suffering a rare heart condition. At the last moment, a specialist from Chicago agreed to operate.

A few weeks later, as his strength returned, Hawkins vowed to give back to his home town of Taunton. He had just the idea…

Since he was a boy, Hawkins had dreamed of owning his own garage, and by the age of 11 he had bought and sold his first car.

At 15, Hawkins was apprenticed to a British Leyland dealer as a mechanic, and in the evenings he carried on trading. Three years later, Hawkins began dealing full time.

By 21, he had bought the first of many garages.

However, by the 1980s, the trade had begun to change: everyone wanted to be a dealer. So Hawkins started selling tyres, undercutting all of his rivals by importing them directly from Germany.

By 39, he had 13 tyre depots – and then Tom Farmer, founder of Kwik Fit, rang. “He said he wanted to buy me out,” recalls Hawkins. “I was thinking about getting into property, so I sold out for £1 million.”

It was the late 1990s, and at the same time as buying properties, Hawkins had started buying what he considered future classic cars: common and more rarefied motors, always immaculate and with solid service histories and low mileages.

Come 2018 and, while Hawkins was recovering in hospital, the local council served him a compulsory purchase order on one of his plots of land.

This visionary, this deal maker, this man who had come close to death was ready for them – and made an offer they couldn’t refuse.

“My big idea to give something back to Taunton was to open a car museum in the centre of the town, and I knew just the place: a failing food store called County Stores that had been trading since 1832,” says Hawkins. “I told the council I wouldn’t make buying my land difficult if they would help facilitate my plans. They agreed.”