And it was also, briefly, the second biggest car company outside the US (after Volkswagen) after it was officially formed 55 years ago, on May 13 1968. BLMC was created out of the merger between the Leyland Motor Corporation and British Motor Holdings, then the two largest wholly British car manufacturing groups in the UK. 

The resultant industrial sprawl saw Austin, Morris, MG, Triumph, Rover, Jaguar, Land Rover, Riley, Wolseley, Vanden Plas and Daimler thrown together, along with an extensive assortment of truck, bus and engineering businesses. The indigestability of this merger, together with massive underfunding and nightmarish industrial unrest saw the business shrinking faster than a lake in an Australian drought.

But that didn’t stop some interesting machines from emerging, several of them legends, before the increasingly stained British Leyland (BL) name was eliminated, in 1986. Join me as we take a look at its best:

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