Redbourn Classics Motor Show 2025 – classic car photography, community and why Hertfordshire's best kept motoring secret deserves your attention
Event and classic car photography in Hertfordshire – shot on Redbourn Common, August 2025
Some events you attend once out of curiosity. Others become fixtures in the calendar that you'd genuinely miss if they disappeared.
The Redbourn Classics Motor Show is firmly in the second category. This was my fourth time at the show with a camera, and the fact that I keep coming back, as a local resident, as a professional photographer, and simply as someone who finds these machines genuinely fascinating, tells you something about what the event gets right.
It gets almost everything right, as it happens.
What the Redbourn Classics actually is
For anyone who hasn't been, the Redbourn Classics is an annual classic car show held on Redbourn Common, just a few miles north of St Albans in Hertfordshire. It's a community event in the truest sense, relaxed, unpretentious, genuinely welcoming, and it draws an extraordinary range of vehicles alongside an equally diverse crowd of owners, enthusiasts and curious locals.
The 2025 show on 30 August was as well-attended as ever, with families, dedicated car enthusiasts and local residents filling the common from mid-morning onwards. The weather kept everyone guessing, warm and muggy with heavy grey skies overhead, but held out for most of the afternoon. Just before 4pm the rain finally arrived, which seemed to be the signal for the cars to roar into life and make their way off the grass. Hearing those engines fire up in sequence around me, a rolling soundtrack of motoring history from the past six decades, was one of the highlights of the day.
The cars – from Lincolns to Ferraris, Minis to Bentleys
The range of vehicles on show is one of the things that makes Redbourn Classics so photogenic and so endlessly interesting to walk around.
At one end of the spectrum you have the genuinely rare and valuable, Porsches, Ferraris, Bentleys, a beautiful Lincoln with chrome work that could occupy a photographer for an hour on its own. At the other end, the everyday classics that trigger an entirely different kind of nostalgia, Minis, Fiat Pandas, Ford Capris, the cars that populated the roads of the 1970s and 1980s and now feel somehow both completely familiar and quietly extraordinary.
What strikes me every year is the detail. The dashboard of a classic Porsche, every dial and switch designed with an intentionality that modern interiors have largely abandoned. The Flying B mascot on a Bentley bonnet, the chrome catching whatever light is available. The engine bay of a Chevrolet, everything exposed and accessible in a way that modern cars are not. A classic Bentley door with a Union Jack motif that manages to feel both patriotic and genuinely stylish. These details are what classic car photography is actually about, and they're what make a set of images genuinely worth having rather than just a record of what was parked on a field.
The people – the real story of any car show
The cars bring people to Redbourn. The people are what make it worth coming back to.
Classic car owners are a particular kind of enthusiast. These are not passive collectors. They are people who have invested years, significant money, and enormous personal energy into acquiring, restoring and maintaining a machine they are genuinely passionate about. They know their cars intimately, the history, the quirks, the stories attached to every scratch and modification. And almost without exception, they are delighted to talk about them.
Walking the lines at Redbourn with a camera, I find that conversations happen naturally. An owner sitting beside their vehicle, watching people admire it, is almost always happy to tell you about it. That openness and warmth is one of the things that makes the Redbourn Classics such a pleasure to photograph.
The human moments are where some of the strongest images come from. A young boy in the driver's seat of a classic car, gripping the wheel with complete, unselfconscious delight. A couple who've clearly been coming to this show for years, sitting contentedly alongside their vehicle in fold-out chairs. A man in a stetson hat and sunglasses beside an American classic, utterly at ease, exactly where he wants to be. These are the images that last, the ones that tell the story of what classic cars actually mean to the people who own and love them.
Why classic car owners deserve better photography
This is something I find myself thinking about every time I'm at an event like this.
Every car on that common represents a significant investment, of money, of time, of care and attention. Many of these vehicles have been restored over years, sometimes decades. Some are genuinely irreplaceable. And yet the vast majority of them will never be professionally photographed in a way that does them justice.
A photograph taken on a phone at a car show is a snapshot. It documents that the car exists. It does not capture the quality of the paintwork in the right light, the character of the interior, the presence of the machine in a considered environment, or the relationship between the owner and the vehicle they've dedicated so much to.
That's what a professional portrait session does. Whether it's shot on location at your home, at a carefully chosen setting in the Hertfordshire countryside, or at an event like the Redbourn Classics itself, a professional set of images gives a classic car owner something that reflects the true value of what they have, and the story behind it.
I offer this. If you own a classic car, a vintage vehicle, a cherished motorcycle or any machine with a history and a personality, I would genuinely love to photograph it for you. These are some of the most rewarding commissions I take on, and the results speak for themselves.
The Redbourn Classics in the wider context
The Redbourn Classics sits alongside the Goodwood Revival, the Redbourn village fete and a handful of other local events as one of the fixtures of the Hertfordshire summer calendar. It doesn't have the scale or the international profile of Goodwood, but it has something Goodwood can't offer – genuine accessibility, a village common setting, and the kind of easy, unpretentious atmosphere where you can spend three hours wandering and talking to people and feel like you've had a proper afternoon.
For local classic car enthusiasts, it's essential. For photographers in Hertfordshire, it's a gift.
I'll be back next year. I always am.
If you own a classic car and have been meaning to have it properly photographed, get in touch. I cover classic car portrait photography across Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and beyond. Commissions can be arranged at a location of your choice.