Lionel Martin and Robert Bamford went into business together in 1913, taking the Aston Martin name from Martin’s successes at the Aston Hill hillclimb near Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire. The first car to carry the name was registered in 1915, and production began in earnest after the First World War from small premises in Kensington, London.
The company struggled financially and was refinanced several times. In 1925 it was renamed Aston Martin Motors and moved to the former Whitehead Aircraft works at Hanworth, Feltham. In 1947 industrialist David Brown bought Aston Martin, and Lagonda soon after, whose W. O. Bentley-designed six-cylinder engine powered the early DB cars. Brown’s initials carried through the DB2, DB4 and the DB5 of 1963.
Aston Martin bought its coachbuilder, Tickford, in 1955, and the Tickford works at Newport Pagnell in Buckinghamshire became the company’s home for over fifty years. Ford bought a controlling stake in 1987 and had full control by 1993, and it built a new factory at Gaydon in Warwickshire, the first purpose-built factory in Aston Martin’s history, which opened in 2003. The last Newport Pagnell car, a Vanquish S, was built in July 2007, the same year Ford sold the company to a consortium led by Prodrive’s David Richards. A second factory at St Athan in South Wales opened in 2019 to build the DBX, the company’s first SUV.
