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Our tour guides for the day were Bentley Seating and Restraints Functional Manager Steve MacManus and Seating Engineer David Irving with whom we discussed the term Grand Tourer. The Grand Tourer is a term often used but rarely lived up to outside of the world of the most prestigious car makers like Bentley. Going on the Grand Tour was a term used to describe the finishing school experiences of landed gentry around the Renaissance who would take in Europe's finest Vistas, the Porcelains of Paris and Marbles of Rome and Greece, which far exceeded in monetary value the canvas art we cherish in this era of iconic image consciousness. Those gentry would have travelled by carriage also around the scenes of Europe and this is the tradition we have inherited today in the form of GT. It is not a question of superlatives that ordinarily populate car writing but a much more subtle experience. It is the shear overwhelming sense of pleasantness of touring itself, the freedom and liberty that the much sought after 'open road' can offer us. In driving one of these Grand Tourers we open up not only the experience of commanding views across our own fair land or elsewhere but also the business of arriving at your destination and continuing one's education there also; as would have the elite of those centuries long since past. For lesser mortals the V&A offers plaster cast life size renditions of these artefacts, some towering, which are considered to be more authentic facsimiles than the originals on account of erosion and the tolls of war. In the case of porcelains my favourite collection is at the Wallace Collection just down from Selfridges on Oxford Street, where many pieces of Marie Antoinette's collection from before the rather sudden end to the reign of King Louis XVI of France. The private 'canvas' art collection there is second only to the Queen's personal gallery.
Car making at Bentley is as how I would think all great design houses would have operated at their peak like the late porcelain company at Wedgewood. Calling Bentley a car is like dismissing Marie Antoinette's personalised ceramics as mere Bone China. They are not simply objects, they are the zenith of design and fashion which marks out an epoch, made all the more important with its passing.