Leslie Hornby is listening to a hit record by Harry Webb on Radio 247, as she zips around town in her shiny new Austin Newmarket. It’s a perfect imaginary scene from the 1960s, but what’s wrong with it?

Well, it’s the names. The model and the singer were really called Leslie Hornby and Harry Webb, but everyone knows them as Twiggy and Cliff Richard; and just as Radio 1 was nearly called Radio 247, “Austin Newmarket” was an early attempt at naming the design classic that we know today as the Mini.

“Newmarket” would have been appropriate in a way: the launch of this much-loved little runabout was a bit of a gamble. As the price of petrol soared following the Suez crisis in the 1950s, motor companies competed to create a fuel-efficient small car for the masses. The man who got there first was a British immigrant and a technological genius, Alec Issigonis. Born nearly 102 years ago to a Graeco-German family in the Ottoman empire, Issigonis conceived the Mini while he was deputy technical director at the British Motor Corporation’s Austin plant in Longbridge. By using a basic rectangular box shape, turning the four-cylinder engine sideways and mounting the gearbox underneath it, he created a machine that was almost as paradoxical as Doctor Who’s Tardis: although it was just 10ft long and parkable in a tight space, there was room for a whole pop group inside.

It is 50 years since BMC’s chairman, Leonard Lord, drove a prototype Mini and gave the thumbs-up for mass production. It was officially launched the following year, on August 26, 1959, the same year as the arrival of the hovercraft and the Barbie doll, and perfectly in time to become a megastar of the 20th century’s brightest decade. The Swinging Sixties simply wouldn’t have swung half as well without it. Ubiquitous rather than common, the Mini became the toy of princesses and movie stars as well as proles.

Peter Sellers bought Minis as trinkets for a succession of girlfriends, and had one fitted with eye-catching wickerwork side panels.

As cute, compact and classy as Audrey Hepburn, the Mini was made for the movies. In The Italian Job (1969), three Mini Cooper S models tear round Turin in a scene that has been voted the best car chase in cinema history. Twenty-five years later, a red Mini was Hugh Grant’s choice of wheels as he raced to the first splicing in Four Weddings and a Funeral – and later the very same car, now green, turned up on TV in Mr Bean. In the 1960s, souped-up Minis became a fixture on the rally circuit, driven hard by racers like Paddy Hopkirk and Timo Mäkinen.

One of the most extravagant Mini makeovers was done for this very organ. In 1965 the British artist Alan Aldridge, then a star designer at The Sunday Times Magazine, whitewashed a hired Mini before attacking it with over 100 tubes of gouache and six cans of silver spray paint. The result showed a psychedelic car with a split personality, driven by two very different characters: a boy racer and a housewife. “The Mini was viewed by women as part of the family, as something for running the kids around and for shopping,” explains 65-year-old Aldridge today. “But for many guys it was a little hot rod for attracting the chicks and racing up the road in.”

The artist had just two days to do the paint job before the car was photographed; then he spent hours washing off all his hard work prior to the Mini’s return to the hire company. He subsequently received an offer of £800 from an art collector for the work – more than twice what the original used car was worth – which he had to decline as it no longer existed.

Now, to celebrate 50 years of the Mini, Aldridge has repeated the feat. This time, because he wanted a more elaborate effect, the Mini was professionally wrapped in an enormous vinyl sheet, the creation of which necessitated a long sequence of processes. “First, everything was hand-drawn using Japanese pens on vellum,” says Aldridge. “Then it was scanned and put together using Photoshop. It was much harder this time: it took three weeks.”

And this is a very different car from the Austin Mini he hired all those years ago. In 2000 the Rover company halted production at Longbridge, and in 2001 BMW launched an entirely new version of the car. “In 1965 I hand-painted it, so I could immediately see where all the curves were,” says Aldridge. “But this time I was sent blueprints, and I had to imagine the curves as I made the artwork.” The new illustrated Mini will be on show at Aldridge’s retrospective exhibition in London this week, and will grace the anniversary celebrations next year.

Though the Mini has changed in all manner of ways over 50 years, the obsession with the car continues. “It’s still one of the best design icons you could wish to own,” says Dave Hollis, 45, leader of the British Mini Club, which boasts about 4,500 members. “Minis are instantly recognisable, and young kids are still interested in them. Whereas if you’ve got a Triumph or something, they’ll probably think, ‘What’s that?’”

Minis are still having extraordinary adventures, too. Fiona Mannion, 46, has been a Mini enthusiast for 28 years, and owns two classic Minis and a special BMW edition. Early this year, she heard an enormous crash outside her house in Allestree, Derbyshire. She found the roof of her new Mini wrecked and covered in blood, with an injured Canada goose and a big rock nearby. It was thought to be an out-of-this-world event: a meteorite had seemingly hit the bird in flight, which had plummeted down and caused £2,500 worth of damage. “We called the RSPCA, but by the time they came a fox had carried it off,” says Mannion. “Thank goodness it was the new Mini and not one of my old classics, which would’ve been much harder to repair.”

The trip of a lifetime

The mind-blowing visions of Alan Aldridge wowed the Beatles and the Stones — and The Sunday Times

Commissioning Alan Aldridge to give a psychedelic paint job to a Mini — as we have now done for the second time in The Sunday Times Magazine’s 46-year history — is like taking two icons of the 1960s and bashing them together in the Large Hadron Collider. Aldridge is the rock’n’roll Hogarth, the pop Hieronymus Bosch, a prolific artist whose fantastical images have graced everything from album covers to Penguin books and political posters. He was so deeply enmeshed in the ’60s scene that he resembled a pop star himself, with his long blond hair and velvet suits. On the way to a meeting with Paul McCartney one day in 1967, he was set upon by shrieking girls convinced that he was Brian Jones of the Stones. Joining The Sunday Times Magazine in the early years of Britain’s pioneering colour supplement, he didn’t stop at painting wild designs on real cars. To illustrate an article about romantic meals made from refrigerated food, he spent a weekend in his studio depicting two amorous diners — and used a big pre-war fridge as his canvas. After he edited the dazzling 1969 book The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics, the band’s Apple company took Aldridge on as ‘design consultan’ (without the T, to denote his sultanic eminence). John Lennon had a slightly longer, no less grand title for him: ‘His Royal Master of Images to Their Majesties the Beatles’. (For his latest exhibition and book, Aldridge adapts a lyric from the song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds to give himself another title: The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes.) He crossed the great musical divide of the times, working with the Stones to create a poster for their Rock and Roll Circus film. He also created an album cover for the Who (A Quick One) and the phantasmagorical sleeve for Elton John’s 1975 album, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. As an impoverished nine-year-old in 1967, I remember deeply coveting The Penguin Book of Comics, with its Aldridge cover showing a tumbling horde of characters, from Superman to Rupert Bear. His famous 1968 poster for a London screening of Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls — in which he turned a nude woman into a hotel, with surreal characters peeking out of her shuttered windows — had the police chasing after him with charges of pornography. But Aldridge is not just a shockmeister. The lavish art he produced for children’s books such as The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast (1973) rivals the work of his hero, Sir John Tenniel, illustrator of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. At 65, Aldridge lives in Los Angeles and is still working. He has inked a deal to conjure images for the fashion designer Sir Paul Smith, and may even team up with Apple once again, collaborating on a Beatles-inspired clothing line at Bloomingdale’s. You can take the man out of the 1960s, but you can’t take the 1960s out of the man.

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