Sixty of the rarest cars in the world stand in the Fountain Court gardens at Hampton Court Palace, Friday 4 to Sunday 6 September 2026, gates from ten.
Thorough Events staged the first Concours of Elegance inside the walls of Windsor Castle in September 2012, sixty historic cars drawn up on the lawn as a tribute to the Diamond Jubilee. It moved to the garden of St James’s Palace in 2013 and reached Hampton Court in 2014, where the Fountain Court gardens have held it since. The form is older than the motor car: a concours d’élégance began in seventeenth-century France, where the aristocracy paraded ornate carriages through the parks of Paris.
What separates a concours from a car show is that the cars are invited rather than entered, and the owners judge one another instead of submitting to a panel. Sixty are asked each year and most have never been seen in Britain: the St James’s field drew thirteen from the United States, twenty from Europe, and others from Russia and Argentina. The Grand Depart, in which the field leaves in convoy through the crowd, has run since that year.
The 2026 edition takes the Fountain Court gardens from Friday 4 to Sunday 6 September, sixty cars on the grass and hundreds more from the car clubs, manufacturers and private collections around them. A concours is judged on a car standing still, so the ground it stands on counts for as much as the field. Nowhere in Britain stages a stationary car better than a Tudor palace garden.