Lord Pembroke – the avid car collector behind Wilton Legends

We haven’t even sat down and Will Pembroke is already infecting us with his enthusiasm. He is in his office at Wilton House, the Wiltshire stately home that, as William Alexander Sidney Herbert, 18th Earl of Pembroke and 15th Earl of Montgomery, he has been running since 2003. Yet the day-to-day at this famous estate – watch The Crown or Bridgerton and you’ll recognise it – is clearly less exciting than the Lemke Collection LeGrande 1:8 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé model he has recently completed. It is a thing of great beauty; photographer Rich Pearce and I are encouraged to feel its weight and check out the intricate details as he waxes lyrical about the build. Seeing as you want to know, it’s taken 100 hours all-in since he received it for Christmas in 2024, 12 hours in the wheels alone, each with about 60 needle-like spokes to be fitted (and there are six of them because the model has two in the boot, as it should).

What will he do with his spare time now it is finally finished? Well, luckily he received a similar Pocher Porsche 917K (Martini livery) model for Christmas just gone. Plus, he is unlikely to have any spare time for the foreseeable future, 2026 being the year in which his long-held ambition to run ‘a new type of concours’ at Wilton House will come to fruition.

Having studied design at Leeds College of Art and Design and Sheffield Hallam University, Will (Lord Pembroke, formally) then worked for Sebastian Conran for a while. He says: “Design is what my brain is wired to do. Running an estate didn’t come naturally, but it’s something that I’ve learned over time, with the help of a brilliant team.” Some 34 people help run Wilton, which includes 12 farms, 14,000 acres of farmland and forestry, a residential and commercial property portfolio, a garden centre, a 250-head Angus beef herd, plus the main house – itself home to one of the country’s finest art collections and which attracts about 30,000 visitors a year.

Little did they imagine a few years ago that filming would contribute so much to revenues: “It’s one of the highest incomes now. They pay well and look after the house, and that’s helped pay for a lot of restoration to the house and grounds. The income is welcome because at any point it’s likely one of the enterprises will require support. Currently arable is struggling and beef is really strong; a couple of years ago it was the other way around.”

Where he inherited his title and job from is well documented, but the source of his devotion to cars is more of a mystery. “My father had no interest in cars, even though I tried to convert him. My sisters, who were both into cars, remember me aged three or four naming everything that drove past.

“I used to cause havoc dashing around the house and cloisters in a pedal car, clipping corners and drifting between 2000-year-old Roman statues. Then my dad bought me a little petrol kart that I could drift around the tracks in the garden and do less damage. I got all the magazines and models, and the only car eight-year-old me ever wanted was a gold Rolls-Royce like my Matchbox model. And a Porsche 959!”

Will got his first car – a Ford Puma – towards the end of his university days, followed by a Honda S2000. Then came the first model to really stick: “Growing up as a PlayStation kid – I learned to drive on the PlayStation! – I had my eyes opened to JDM cars. I went to Japfest at Billing Aquadrome when I was 26, and there was a silver R34 Skyline V-Spec. Forget about saving for a house deposit – I got my first Skyline, which was a very special moment.

“For a couple of years it was my daily, street-parked in London. Then one morning it was gone. The insurance company was great and I found a Bayside Blue V-Spec II in Japan that I still have. I get very attached to cars and I’m fortunate not to have to sell all of them, but any time I have two pennies to rub together, I spend them on cars.”

Because he doesn’t fit in a Bizzarrini Strada, top of his current shopping list is a Fiat Panda 100HP, but there’s been a 997 Carrera 2S (“so perfect it lacked character”), 240Z (“looked great but was an expensive rotbox, a valuable lesson”), 3.0 CSL (“another folly, rotten to the core”), a price-record-setting M635 CSi (“I got carried away”), a Gullwing (“too original to enjoy”), 288 GTO, 991 GT3 Touring, B7 RS4, E-type S1 4.2, Alfa 8C Competizione, Renault Clio Cup and a series of Discoverys.

Since he branched out into trackdays and Historic motor sport in his 30s, he has acquired a beautifully prepped (by Simon Blake at Historic Automobiles) Mustang, a track-focused Honda S2000 and, most recently, a BMW M4 GTS. “I’ve been trying to spend a lot of time at the Nürburgring, but I’m only about 50 laps in, so I’m not at the point where I’ve got 100 percent conviction in every corner. I’ve got three more days booked this year, by the end of which I think I’ll be getting close to setting a time.”

But one car changed everything, almost 20 years ago. “I’d adored the Bugatti Veyron since it was a concept and, after a friend and I tested one on the A303, it was unlike anything I’d experienced. I had to have one. I part-funded it by selling a David Hockney painting that my father, who was friends with Hockney, had bought. It sounds crazy, but they were huge and we had nowhere to put this one. It was either going into storage or to a gallery where it could be on display and appreciated. So I sold one to help buy the Bugatti and put the rest on finance, which crippled me so much that, when I went to collect it, I flew Germanwings from Bournemouth because it was only £40.”

Sadly, after a while the Bugatti had to go. “At one point I had the Veyron, the Gullwing and the 280 GTO, which was a trilogy I will dine out on for life, but I’d just done one set of tyres and one service on the Veyron and that was enough to terrify me. I realised that if anything major went wrong it would end up on bricks, so common sense prevailed.”

By that point the Molsheim supercar had already worked its magic and led Will into a completely new field: events. “That car put me on the map. Up until then, I just had my cars, I didn’t move in car circles or go to car events. There was a guy called Jay Broom, who invited me to a meet at Chris Evans’ pub after seeing my Bugatti in The Daily Mail. About 60 cars turned up and it was a bit of a squeeze so I said: ‘Why don’t you bring the cars to mine next time, and we’ll see if we can raise money for a local charity?’ Wilton Classic & Supercars was born.”

At the first event in 2009 there were about 150 cars, 5000 people and a couple of burger vans, but by 2015 it had become a huge full-on festival with motorcycle displays and 10,000 visitors. And that was the problem. “It was getting so dominant that I had to put the brakes on. I had four children under the age of six, who I wanted to spend more time with, plus an estate to run and an event that was getting unmanageable and also very time-consuming, expensive and risky.

“I’d also started my charity Wilton Wake Up Breakfast Club, which was taking off and, in comparison, they were really easy to organise and gave me the excuse to have a slap-up fried breakfast once a month.”

The Wilton Classic & Supercar Show may have been put on the back-burner, but the idea of presenting a new type of event did not dim and on June 19-21, 2026 Wilton will host its first Wilton Legends. How will this be different? “I go to so many shows and I see beautiful cars and I have a glass of Champagne, chat with some friends, buy something more expensive than I intended to buy from one of the stands, but I never really get under the skin of the cars. I admire their patina but I don’t know how they earned it, and it is that history that Wilton Legends will bring to life.

“I have a vision of a tent with a stage, a couple of comfy chairs, a big screen and some old boy that used to race the car in the 1940s being interviewed and just sharing all these incredible stories in front of videos of him racing as a 20-year-old.

“Cars and people have all these incredible tales to tell, but there don’t seem to be any shows that really bring the cars and people to life in that way. I just thought how cool it would be to have a show based around all these amazing stories. It could be a rusty VW Beetle worth two or three grand that looks like a piece of junk, but one family’s owned it for 70 years and has driven it to the North Pole and twice around the world.”

Of course, Will has the perfect car for the event himself, his ex-Raymond Mays, Shelsley-winning Low Chassis Invicta S Type, a car that so entranced him that he sold a “beautiful but history-less” Ferrari 288 GTO to buy it – he has since tried to avoid comparing value trajectories. The Invicta is particularly special because it ties in with ancestral motoring history that, for a long time, he didn’t know he had. “When my grandfather on my mother’s side died, we found old photo albums with dozens of photos of my maternal greatgrandfather racing at Brooklands. His grandfather was Sir Henry Tate, of Tate & Lyle sugar, and for his 21st birthday he was given a 1908 GP race Mercedes. Thanks to Ben Collings I managed to track it down; it’s now owned by George Wingard. We had no idea! And then Oliver Lyle from the same company was a seed investor in Noel Macklin’s Invicta company, so it just feels right.”

So, let’s imagine it is a sunny day in June, Wilton’s Wilton Legends is in full swing and the MC announces that the host is going to come up in one of his cars and drive through the tent and sit in one of the comfy chairs and tell us all about it. That’s going to be the Invicta, obviously.

“When I drive the Invicta I love thinking of the fact that Raymond Mays held that steering wheel, that he was sat in the same seat driving around Brooklands. I think of the car driving around Africa and I think of the engineering that went into it and Reid Railton sitting at a drawing board designing its competition engine. Whenever I am in the car I’m feeling that history the whole time, so yeah. No question, that’s the one…

“…Or the Skyline. That car’s also got some amazing stories. And all the Skyline’s stories are my stories, too.”

Photography: Rich Pearce/Amy Shore. Article originally appeared in Octane magazine.