When the government closed RAF Gaydon in the mid-1970s, the site looked like what it was: 600-odd acres of flat, well-drained Warwickshire farmland with a substantial main runway and a cluster of large hangars. In the late 1970s British Leyland bought the airfield and converted it into a vehicle development facility and proving ground for what was called BL Technology. The first major piece of new infrastructure was a wind tunnel, contracted in 1980. The runway became the spine of an emerging test-track network. The Gaydon-type hangars - built to fit V-bomber wingspans - made unusually accommodating workshops, and several of them are still in use today.

The ownership of Gaydon is, in itself, a short history of the British motor industry's late 20th-century contortions. In 1988 BL's vehicle assets passed, by then called the Rover Group, to British Aerospace. In 1994 BMW bought Rover. In 2000 BMW sold the Land Rover business to Ford. Ford by that point also owned Jaguar and Aston Martin, and it expanded Gaydon to make it the headquarters and design centre of Aston Martin as well, while continuing to develop Jaguar models on the same site. In 2007 Ford sold Aston Martin to private investors, and Aston Martin's Gaydon facility went with the sale - it sits adjacent to the JLR site to this day. In 2008 Ford sold Jaguar and Land Rover, by then operating as a single integrated company, to India's Tata Motors. Tata still owns the company. Through all of it, the same engineers continued to walk the same corridors and test the same kinds of cars on the same concrete.

The Gaydon Centre is not a factory. No production cars roll off Gaydon's lines; assembly happens at Solihull, Halewood and (for some Jaguars) historically at Castle Bromwich. Gaydon is where vehicles are designed, then engineered, then proven. There is a styling studio where new bodies are modelled. There are extensive electronics and powertrain laboratories. There are test rigs that simulate decades of road use in compressed time. Outside, the proving ground includes pavé sections that imitate cobbled European streets, a hill route for transmission and braking work, a high-speed bowl, a 'rough road' that punishes suspensions, and dedicated off-road courses where every Land Rover and Range Rover product has, somewhere in its development cycle, climbed muddy banks and waded through measured fords.

The Gaydon site car park now has 166 charging points for electric vehicles, each rated at 7 kW AC - a small detail that reflects a larger transition. The Jaguar marque committed to going all-electric in the second half of the 2020s, and a great deal of the engineering work involved in that change happens at Gaydon. Battery integration, thermal management, power-electronics validation, software calibration: each new generation of vehicle creates new categories of test and new buildings to house the equipment. The mature electric Jaguar concept cars and the production Land Rover and Range Rover plug-in hybrids that preceded them were all developed here. The car park is also where the engineers go for sandwich runs, and on a sunny lunchtime it can hold an unusually interesting cross-section of British automotive history in active daily use.

Walk to the southern boundary of the JLR site and you can see, across a fence, the British Motor Museum and its Collection Centre - the public expression of the same industrial heritage that the engineering centre quietly continues. Walk further and you can pick out the surviving RAF Gaydon control tower and the two Gaydon-type hangars. Of those two, only one still wears its original outline. Nuclear-capable Vickers Valiants of No. 138 Squadron stood here in 1955 ready to fly. Today, in roughly the same square footage, JLR test engineers measure the cabin acoustics of a Range Rover Velar prototype. Two specific kinds of British engineering ambition - the strategic deterrent and the world-leading 4x4 - have used the same patch of Warwickshire ground.