So, you want to start a car museum. You will need some cars and a place to put them. You will also need deep pockets. Above all, you will need a vision and a cast-iron determination to achieve your goal.

In short, you will need to be like Pat Hawkins. The 62-year-old has a light in his eyes that not even a brush with death could extinguish.

It was six years ago. He had been rushed to hospital, suffering a rare heart condition. At the last moment, a specialist from Chicago agreed to operate.

A few weeks later, as his strength returned, Hawkins vowed to give back to his home town of Taunton. He had just the idea…

Since he was a boy, Hawkins had dreamed of owning his own garage, and by the age of 11 he had bought and sold his first car.

At 15, Hawkins was apprenticed to a British Leyland dealer as a mechanic, and in the evenings he carried on trading. Three years later, Hawkins began dealing full time.

By 21, he had bought the first of many garages.

However, by the 1980s, the trade had begun to change: everyone wanted to be a dealer. So Hawkins started selling tyres, undercutting all of his rivals by importing them directly from Germany.

By 39, he had 13 tyre depots – and then Tom Farmer, founder of Kwik Fit, rang. “He said he wanted to buy me out,” recalls Hawkins. “I was thinking about getting into property, so I sold out for £1 million.”

It was the late 1990s, and at the same time as buying properties, Hawkins had started buying what he considered future classic cars: common and more rarefied motors, always immaculate and with solid service histories and low mileages.

Come 2018 and, while Hawkins was recovering in hospital, the local council served him a compulsory purchase order on one of his plots of land.

This visionary, this deal maker, this man who had come close to death was ready for them – and made an offer they couldn’t refuse.

“My big idea to give something back to Taunton was to open a car museum in the centre of the town, and I knew just the place: a failing food store called County Stores that had been trading since 1832,” says Hawkins. “I told the council I wouldn’t make buying my land difficult if they would help facilitate my plans. They agreed.”

That was the easy bit. The hard part was relieving the owners of their keys and then, with sleeves rolled up and talented tradespeople hired, refurbishing and converting the tired 23,500sq ft shop. That took a year, and by the time the museum was ready to be occupied, Hawkins had burned through £3.5m.

Meanwhile, he was continuing to buy display cars from private sellers and at auctions. “All told, the cars have cost me around £2.5m,” he says.

At last, in November 2023, County Classics Motor Museum was ready to open; The Grand Tour presenter Richard Hammond cut the red tape and the first visitors passed through the doors.

Just as they did then, greeting today’s arrivals are more than 100 cars, most of them spanning the 1950s to the 1990s, and an equal number of motorcycles.

An eclectic mix of the common, the rare, the beautiful and the fascinating, most of the cars are low-mileage and have just one previous owner, and all of them are in original condition.

For a flavour of how diverse the collection is, it includes Ford Capris, probably the most rust-free Fiat X1/9 in the country, a Ford Mustang Mach 1, a Datsun 280ZX, a super-rare Nissan Cherry Europe GTi, a Porsche 911 3.2 SC, a 1961 Porsche 718 RS 61 Spyder, a genuine 1997 AC Cobra Superblower 5L, a pair of Ford Escort RS Turbo Series 1 Group A and Lancia Fulvia S1 rally cars, a Ford Racing Puma, a Peugeot 205 GTi 1.9, a Volkswagen Golf GTI Mk1, a rare Subaru XT 4WD Turbo and an Audi Quattro Turbo.

All these plus a Jaguar E-Type, a Triumph Dolomite, a Morris Marina, a Mini Metro, a Toyota MR2 Mk1…

“For most middle-age visitors, they’re the cars of their youth – although one 90-year-old gentleman was delighted to see our Austin Seven Special,” says Hawkins.

To date, the museum has welcomed 45,000 visitors, one of them being Martin Read, who has driven up from Torquay. “I’m shocked by how much they have here,” he says. “I’m that impressed, I’ve bought an annual pass.”

Hawkins is convinced that his museum will be a boon for Taunton. “We know people are making special journeys to come and then seeing the rest of the town,” he says. “The council had a good deal.”

And so did car enthusiasts.