The supercar 'Batcave': inside London's most exclusive garage

Naturally, you can’t expect just to turn up and take your car out. First, it has to go through a ‘departure protocol’, when lights and levels are tested, the exterior and interior prepared and the MOT and road tax status checked – and updated if necessary. Only then can you pick it up – or have it delivered.

I visit on a Friday, and 28 cars are out with their lucky owners for the weekend. I content myself with lifting the corners of a few covers to glimpse alloy wheels you could eat your dinner off. It goes without saying that Windrush’s customers are that special breed they call ‘cash rich, time poor’. “Lottery winners, VIPs, celebrities…” is all the folk at Windrush will say about the firm’s clients, before revealing 1966 World Cup legend Geoff Hurst has a car here. Not German, I take it.

The man behind this remarkable place is Tim Earnshaw. For five years he managed the Marlboro hospitality units used by the Ferrari F1 team.

“That experience instilled in me a real attention to detail,” he says. That’s obvious, but what makes Earnshaw’s business special is that he knows deep down what it means to want the very best for your motor.

Back in 1994, aged just 13, he began building a replica Morgan 4/4 on the bones of an MGB. His parents owned a farm and Earnshaw stored his work-in-progress in one of the outbuildings. Eventually he left for university but he would return at weekends to work on the Moggy.

“I hated leaving it in a working shed where it might be damaged, so I commandeered a vacant one elsewhere on the farm,” he says. “It was huge: 5000 square feet. I thought, ‘There’s plenty of room for other people to store their cars here, too’, so I built a website and began advertising the space.”

In no time, he was storing a neighbour’s Jaguar E-Type and Mk2, and another’s Mitsubishi Evo VI.

Then followed five seasons with events company Procar, during which time Earnshaw got his Class 1 HGV licence and looked after the Marlboro F1 motorhome fleet. Behind the scenes he continued to develop his car storage business, rushing home to prepare customers’ cars for collection. By the time he decided to quit Procar, in 2009, he was storing 35 cars.

“I thought I could make a business of it but knew I wanted it to be about more than simply car storage,” he says. “I wanted to go the extra mile – in-storage checks, departure protocol, and collection and delivery wherever, whenever. Our motto is ‘The answer’s always yes’.”

Which is why Earnshaw recently found himself collecting a Rolls at 8pm and returning it, valeted, to the customer at 8am the next morning. And why one of his drivers delivered a customer’s Porsche 930 Turbo to Reims to save his holiday after his Ferrari 575M broke down.