Issigonis’s revolutionary design was commissioned by the British Motor Corporation, as an answer to the popularity of the German bubble car. The introduction of petrol rationing following the Suez crisis of 1956 created the need for cars that were particularly economical in their fuel usage, and the bubble – a sort of shopping-bag with an internal combustion engine – was the preferred, if inelegant, solution for many car-buyers. The basis of the Mini’s appeal as an economical car lay, first and foremost, in the fact that at least it actually looked like a car.

The Mini, as its name stated, was to be the smallest car BMC produced, but it was intended that it should use an existing engine, rather than have a new one built especially for it. Issigonis’s Morris Minor had been compact enough, but the Mini set a whole new standard for the prudent use of space. Once allowance had been made for a family of four, and (a modest amount of) luggage they might take with them on a holiday at the seaside, there was only 18in of space left for the engine. It was turned sideways so as to accommodate it, with the gearbox shoehorned in beneath it.

With its centre of gravity upfront, the Mini was supremely manoeuvrable. Rubber suspension, hard-wearing tyres and ultra-responsive steering all contributed to its lithe and limber image. Perhaps because of these engineering refinements, the car was initially seen as being over-complicated to drive. Its two original versions, the Morris Mini Minor and the Austin Seven, were both slow-burners commercially at first, but then something happened to change all that.

A racy number

The Mini Cooper was launched in 1961. It was designed explicitly as a performance Mini, a car for the racing circuits. Improbable though it might have seemed, the Mini had acquired a brash younger sibling. If the Mini Minor was the sensible elder son who passed his exams, went to college and was careful with money, the Mini Cooper was his tearaway kid brother, a rock-and-roller with grease in his hair and a taste for life in the fast lane. Literally. The Mini Cooper went racing in the Monte Carlo rally every year, and won the event no fewer than three times.

The Cooper’s success now rubbed off on the original Mini. In the early 1960s, the Mini began to acquire a layer of cool. All four members of the Beatles bought one, as did a string of movie stars - from Steve McQueen to Brigitte Bardot. Racing-drivers were seen driving them. Even the Queen owned a Mini.

A mini revival

When the Mini Cooper was dropped in 1971, there were howls of wounded outrage, but it didn't make a comeback until 1990. The whole story looked like it had come to an end in 2000, when the final Minis rolled off the production line. Today, though, an up-to-the-minute version of the Mini – BMW’s MINI – is once more a cool accessory. Its favoured livery, pulsating cherry-red with go-faster stripes and an optional St George or Union flag painted on the roof, has made it a car to turn heads, the sort of car the boy next door can only look on in envy at as you gun the engine into reverse thrust and back out of your driveway.

Over five million people bought the Mini in one model or another over the course of four decades and more. It was eventually manufactured all over the world, and it provided the basis for a whole generation of smaller cars known generically as super-minis. At the height of its fame, it was as much an icon of the Swinging Sixties as the Fab Four and Carnaby Street, and this was the era in which it famously gave its name to another undisputed Icon of England, Mary Quant’s taboo-busting little skirt. Click here to read more about the miniskirt.