Opinion: A lament for Land Rover's Aintree Green
Reader Oliver Jerome's Land RoverGreen has been a key part of the Land Rover range for decades. An Autocar reader laments the demise of a classic colour option
The following piece was submitted to Autocar by long-time reader Oliver Jerome. Let us know whether you agree or disagree with him in the comments below
Never has a colour defined a brand more than green has for Land Rover. As we celebrate 70 years of Land Rover, the recent passing from the standard colourway of Aintree Green — the final descendant of noble ancestors Deep Bronze, Keswick, Belize, Tonga, Coniston, Lincoln, Epsom and Galway — signifies the end of an era.
It is with a heavy heart that I inform you of the great sadness that has befallen the Land Rover online vehicle configurator. We have already accepted that the glorious days of wandering through the meadow of 27 Defender variants were long gone; our hearts can no longer flutter at the film-star handsome patrician L322 Range Rover and the square-jawed Tardistank Discovery 4 has been ushered from this mortal stage.
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But sudden was the dark veil of grief that cloaked the user upon the realisation that Land Rover no longer offers Aintree Green as a standard colour option for its range of vehicles.
Following Jaguar Land Rover’s most recent act of senicide, when it finally saw off the Defender, we were subjected to a full autopsy of the old beast. Perhaps partly in appeasement of its own guilt, Land Rover implored us with stories about Maurice Wilkes, about Anglesey and Red Wharf Bay, about that shape in the sand, fois-gras-goosing us with heritage until our ears bled and our eyes stung with Instagram spam of helicopter montages.
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And the green paint? How many words on that green, leftover army surplus green paint, any colour you liked as long as it was green? HUE166 was green, the final Defender was green, the fabric of the brand was green, it is the reason the Land Rover oval is now green.
Green was to Land Rover as red was to Ferrari, blue to Bugatti, orange to McLaren. Wilkes’s original hand-painted (and, in my mind, matt) green finish sired more than a dozen glorious variants — colours that defined their era and their maker. Was there ever a hue more glorious than Keswick, the tone that HUE166 himself wears so proudly?
And so it is that we mourn for Aintree Green. Sadly not a natural death — eviscerated from the configurator because JLR simply didn’t feel the demand was there. We enter a post-green age, a sloe-black, slow black, triple black, crystal-meth black-tinted black-packed world, as if the entire vehicle had been hot-dipped in crude oil.
I long for Aintree Green as a standard green. If you dig deep enough into the configurator with sufficient Python coding skills, you may unlock the secret Spectral British Racing Green ChromaFlair Gloss finish, a special order colour for the Range Rover. You will, however, be charged a rather fulsome £6120. A British Racing Green is also offered, for £3570.
How should we interpret the absence of standard-fit green paint from a company so focused on heritage? Has JLR forgotten the land owner for whom the Lincoln Green two-door Rangie was invented, to cross fields by day and park on the forecourt of the Savoy by night? Has the company erased from memory the plucky farmer, digging for Britain, using the take-off from his Series I to power the mulcher? Does JLR think of the utilities, the emergency services, the army, the adventurers, the explorers, the builders, the merchants? Or does it not fit with the notion of lifestyle, reduced to a faint mirage in glossy adverts, a heritage apple with a hollowed-out core?
Aintree Green is grassroots. Aintree Green was the spirit of the company that gave us the 50th Anniversary Defender V8, the icon that burbled through my Park Lane test drive in 1998, available at an accessible price and accessible volumes. Twenty years on, in this post-green age, we’re given the same vehicle for £150k, to be sold only by appointment.
Green-era Land Rover would not have built the Velar, or the Evoque Cabriolet (imagine: would the farmer in Peter Rabbit be seen in such a thing?).
The passing of Aintree Green marks the passing of my love for Land Rover. We have all lost an old friend, a gentleman in a brown warehouse coat that always knew where the half-inch brass screws were.
After one Freelander, three proper Range Rovers, one Range Rover Sport, two Discovery 4s, three Defender 90s, two Defender 110s and even a Series 1 (yes, all green; the Series 1 even had paint left over from the war, you know…), I am done.
I am going to buy a Mercedes-AMG G63 — in green.
Oliver Jerome
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