Anglia Estate (United Kingdom, 1959)

During the 1950s, station wagons had undergone a huge shift in popularity in Britain. In 1950 they were commonly a utilitarian vehicle built on an existing saloon car body by a specialist coachbuilder, usually involving little more than an extended roofline and additional windows, with a tailgate fashioned to fit. By the late 1950s, station wagons had moved to become a model within their own right, and were more often being built alongside their saloon companions in-house within the walls of the automotive factories.

This was the case for most car makers, though low volume models tended to remain coachbuilt, particularly those whose construction entailed a full chassis rather than the more modern monocoque shell. A departure from that norm could be observed within both Ford and Vauxhall ranges, where the large family saloons, the Consul/Zephyr/Zodiac and Velox/Cresta, were still farmed out for construction, respectively to Abbotts of Farnham, and Grosvenor, Friary, and Martin Walter (depending on the model and period).

The smaller estate cars, such as those Ford's Anglia and Prefect 100E models, were built in-house as the Escort and Squire, though were based on the Thames 300E van and could best be considered as vans with rear seats rather than as saloon-based estate cars. A true estate car was not built by Ford until the Anglia 105E models arrived. Of course there was an Anglia-based van - the 307E - that Ford could have utilised in the same way as they had with the 100E/300E models and fashioned a van-based estate car, but with a sharp eye on its opponents and their domination of the wagon market, they chose to instead build a proper, saloon-based estate car instead.

The estate car went further than what had been common practice in simply adding on a roof extension, additional windows and a tailgate. In the case of the Anglia, Ford discarded the Anglia's characteristic rear lamps and the reverse-rake rear window treatment, totally redesigning the C-pillar area to create a harmonious flow into the rear section of the vehicle. In order to allow as wide a luggage opening as possible, a set of leaner, more vertically-oriented tail lamps were used, along with a one-piece tailgate - itself a break from the traditional two-piece units as used on many estate cars or the 'barn door' examples as used on smaller Austin and Morris vehicles.