HWM: The World's Longest-Established Aston Martin Dealership

Not every piece of Walton’s history is about the river or the church. Near Walton Bridge, a garage business founded in 1938 went on to build its own Grand Prix cars, give a teenage Stirling Moss his start in top-level motor racing, and become the longest-established Aston Martin dealership anywhere in the world. The name gives away its origins: HWM stands for Hersham and Walton Motors, tying the firm directly to both halves of this guide.

Hersham and Walton Motors

HWM was founded in 1938 by John Heath, an engineer and accomplished racing driver, and was joined in 1946 by George Abecassis, another serious racing talent. What began as a garage and dealership business quickly grew a second identity as a racing car constructor, competing in Formula One and Formula Two as well as sports car racing through the early 1950s, an unusually ambitious sideline for a firm rooted in a Surrey car dealership.

Building their own racing cars

HWM built and campaigned its own single-seater racing cars under the HWM name through the early 1950s, competing at Grand Prix level against factory teams with vastly larger budgets. The team scored a genuine landmark early on: Johnny Claes won the Grand Prix des Frontières at Chimay in an HWM, the first post-war Grand Prix victory for a British-built car, a result that gave the small Walton-based team a real claim to a place in British motor racing history.

Stirling Moss’s first Grand Prix

HWM’s best-known contribution to motor racing history is the driver it gave a start to rather than any single race result. Stirling Moss, then still establishing himself after strong performances in Formula Three, was given his first drive in top-level international racing by HWM, and it was in an HWM car that he made his Grand Prix debut, at the 1951 Swiss Grand Prix, finishing eighth. Moss went on to race for the team for close to two years before moving on to the career that would make him one of the most celebrated drivers in the sport’s history, and HWM’s role as the team that gave him his start remains one of the most significant footnotes in British motor racing.

HWM today

HWM’s racing ambitions did not last as long as its dealership business. The firm acquired the Aston Martin franchise in 1951, and that side of the business has long outlived the works racing team, making HWM the world’s longest-established Aston Martin dealership, still trading under the same name from the same corner of Walton more than seven decades later. It is a rare example of a business that has genuinely spanned Walton’s entire postwar motoring history, from Grand Prix ambition to a settled, long-running dealership.