For years, I’d wondered why on Earth MG had a showroom in the posh bit of West London, on Piccadilly, opposite greengrocer-to-the-royals Fortnum & Mason. It felt incongruous, to say the least, and even more so when on closer inspection well-heeled passers-by would see a decade-old MG TF in the corner. Was it for sale? If so, was it some kind of delivery-mileage time-warp that had somehow become valuable?
Who knows. But what I now realise is that MG’s prime W1 real estate is starting to make sense. The British brand has been in Chinese ownership since 2005, first by Nanjing Automobile, which was then purchased by SAIC Motor, a Chinese State-owned automotive giant selling millions of cars a year. Lotus, another British brand now owned by the Chinese, has a similarly plush new showroom just a few doors down Piccaddily, while China’s BYD, the world’s largest EV maker, is a few minutes’ walk away, rubbing shoulders with Bentley and Ferrari down on Berkeley Square.
