It’s summer 2015, and Andrew ‘Pregg’ Preston is out for a ride near his home on the ‘62 Vespa he’s just had transformed into a tribute to his late father Mick.
He’s only doing 30mph, his lights are on, and life is good on a warm, light late evening, when a car comes roaring out of a side road.
The next few seconds would turn Pregg’s world upside down and leave him permanently paralysed from the waist down.
“This lad was showing off to his friends,” he says at his home in Leicestershire. “He put it in first gear and floored it, and I was his brakes. I went flying.”
His spinal cord was severed, along with two punctured lungs, four broken ribs, and a shattered left knee now held together by metalwork.
“My left leg was up by my head, and they gave me gas and air to straighten it out, then morphine, which was just like taking paracetamol I was in so much pain,” he remembers. “They said to me that they didn’t anticipate me surviving the operation, and I panicked – please phone my wife, phone my mum.
“I had to wait until midnight for a doctor to come out and prescribe ketamine, and as soon as they gave me that it was lights out, I don’t remember anything.”
Ten hours of surgery
Ten hours of surgery followed to place two metal rods either side of his spine, held in place by screws.
At the time of the accident, Pregg had just three scooters – the Vespa, a Lambretta GP125 called Claire-Louise in honour of his late sister, and an Indian LML for “pootling around the village”.
But once he was back home after about 26 weeks – including 14 weeks in the Princess Royal Spinal Cord Injuries Centre in Sheffield – and in receipt of his insurance settlement, the lure of owning every scooter he ever wanted proved too much.
“Basically I just went mad, and I mean mad,” he says. “I couldn’t resist. I’d always said, if I did get any money, I’d go mad on scooters. I was just obsessed, absolutely obsessed.
“The scooters that I’ve bought are scooters that I’d have never been able to afford.”
We’re chatting in Pregg’s ‘man cave’, a large garage purpose-built to house his collection of more than 40 scooters, trimmed down from more than 80 at its peak.
“This was rammed from one end to the other – you couldn’t get a fag paper between them they were in so tight,” he says. “I’d also got a double garage on the back of the house that was rammed with mainly Vespa.
“You name it, I’d got the lot”
“I’d got five or six GSs, SSs, you name it, I’d got the lot. I’d also got three round my friend’s bungalow – two in his spare room and one in his hallway, and then I’d still got two other units on the go. I’d got them every-bloody-where.
“There’s another bloke who had over 100, and I wanted to beat him. But then I thought ‘there’s just no point’, so I kept the ones that I really love.”
Before we delve into some of Pregg’s treasures, let’s go back to 1983 and a teenager’s passion for the scooters, music and style of the mod revival.
“I started off as a mod because of the style – the parkas, the blazers, the inch-wide ties, the Sta-Prest trousers and all of that – I loved it,” he says. “I’d always seen scooters going around in the village and it’s something I’d always liked, I’d always fancied.
“Then I got offered a little Primavera, a 3-speed 90cc, and I was only 14 at the time.”
As a responsible insurance broker, we obviously don’t condone what Pregg, now 54, says next, but it’s part of his story…
“I actually went to Skeggy on it – obviously I hadn’t got a licence or anything, but when you’re sat in the middle of everybody, you don’t get detected.
“The passion, the smell, the style”
“It just started from that really. This passion, the smell, the style. Just beautiful. Apart from for three months in the late ‘90s, I’ve never been without a scooter since.”
He then tells the “funny story” of how he came to buy and insure his first legal scooter at 17, a Lambretta Li125, also probably not to be recommended…
“My mum and dad had gone on holiday with friends, all in one car, so my dad had left his old Austin Princess at home,” he says. “It was a beautiful colour, maroon with a beige roof on it.
“Anyway, I needed £120 to insure my scooter, and my mate was looking for a car, so I sold him my dad’s car while he’d gone on holiday.
“I’ll never forget it, because when he came back from holiday I was so blase about it, I wasn’t bothered. I was just hell-bent on getting that scooter legally on the road.
“My dad walked in the house, ‘how have you coped?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, all right’.
“He came through the house and he cocked his head out of the side, and his words were ‘where the f*ck’s the car gone?’ As I’m trying to explain, there was this massive skid, and as you looked out, my mate came bombing down the road, him and his missus in this Princess, ripped the handbrake up and did a long skid.
“Well, my dad went mad.”
Pregg needed to buy the car back, but his ‘mate’ decided he wanted £250 for it.
“My dad paid the £250, which was a lot of money back then, and I had to work it off,” he says. “But I got my scooter on the road.”
After the Li125 came a cut down Lambretta SX150 as the scooterboy scene took hold in the ‘80s.
“Fantastic times”
“They were fantastic times,” he says. “Personally, I think the ‘80s was the best era – the clothes, all the camo, the pilot jackets, Doc Marten boots.
“The scene was fantastic – the music, the people. I could never do the northern soul dancing, but to watch them was just amazing.”
Into the ‘90s, and another scooter comeback thanks to the Britpop scene, with the likes of Modfather Paul Weller and scooter-loving bands like Oasis and Blur.
“It was then that I got married and had kids, and then it stopped for me,” says Pregg. “Although I’d got a scooter, I couldn’t just drop everything and go on weekend rallies. A lot of people did, but at that point my family meant more.”
For years, Pregg enjoyed his scooters closer to home, a leisure pursuit as family life curtailed the wanderlust associated with the rallies all over the country of his youth.
“We used to go to the pub in the next village when it was bikers night,” he says. “We’d pull into the car park and everything would stop, like you’ve pressed pause on your video. But after about half an hour everyone was chatting – we were all on two wheels, we all had a shared interest.”
But then, the accident changed everything.
Of the three scooters he had at the time, only the LML has gone – the ‘Claire-Louise’ Lambretta remains, as does the Vespa that was badly damaged in the crash.
“It would have to be two”
Both scooters mean a lot to him, and when asked which one of the 40 or so in his collection he’d keep if he was forced to sell the rest, he says: “I couldn’t do one, it would have to be two.
“My sister was only 21 when she was killed in an accident, so that one would have to stay, and the Vespa.
“If I’d had the accident on the LML, I don’t think I’d have bothered getting it rebuilt, but I had to because it was that one. I’d had loads of photos of my dad lacquered onto it, and I was really gutted because one of the leg shields and one side was all smashed in.
“My mate Dick organised it, and I paid for it to be rebuilt.”
These two have since been joined by almost every type of Lambretta and Vespa imaginable, from scooters from Quadrophenia to award-winning customs and mint condition rarities.
At the back of the garage are two of the most recognisable scooters anywhere in the world, immortalised in Quadrophenia – a replica of ‘Ace Face’ Sting’s Vespa GS (actually a Rally 200 in disguise), and Jimmy’s Lambretta Li150 signed by actor Phil Daniels.
Both were bought from renowned scooter-builder David Wyburn, as was the white GS next door – a replica of the scooter used on the album cover of The Who’s Quadrophenia rock opera double album of 1973.
Dave Wyburn scooters
“I put an ad on Facebook asking if anyone knows anyone who makes Jimmy replicas,” says Pregg. “Someone said ‘try Dave Wyburn’, so I contacted him and he said ‘well, I’ve got one that I’m building at the minute’.
“This bloke in America was buying it but he was short coming up with the deposit, so I asked him how much it was. He told me and I said ‘give me two minutes and I’ll send the whole lot to you’.
“When he told me he was building a GS (Sting’s scooter), I thought ‘if you’ve got one you’ve got to have the other – it’s rude not to’.
“Then he came up with the other GS from the album, so I thought ‘I’ve got to have that’.”
Among other memorabilia from the film in Pregg’s collection is a blue-zip parka from the set, a leather jacket and suit.
Then there’s the purple Vespa GS from the cover of Alan Fletcher’s Quadrophenia novel, brought out as a companion to the film in 1979, and the Li150 Jimmy replica used in Devlin Crow’s short film Being.
Among the customs are Vlad the Impaler, based on an SX150 frame; serial trophy-winner Rat Fink; a Carry On Scootering Lambretta with artwork of the actors; the Absinthe Lambretta with a paint job that cost £4,500; and a Skelly Lambretta sprayed in canary yellow.
Other notable scooters include Lambretta Silver and Gold Specials, a cream Lambretta TV175 series I, a TV200 Series III, and the open-frame, 75cc Lambretta Vega.
Pregg, who has the Lambretta logo tattooed on his chest with the word ‘hoarder’ underneath, may not be able to ride any of these scooters, but they’ve played a key role in his recovery from the accident.
“It keeps you sane”
“I come in here, put a bit of music on, have a look round at what I’ve got, and it kind of keeps you sane – it’s just very therapeutic,” he says, his garage also proving something of a social hub for fellow scooterists.
“All the lads come up on a Friday night, four or five of us, and we sit in here. A couple of weeks ago, Dick and his wife Sharon said ‘why don’t we do something here’? Brian Ford, of the All or Nothing Scooter Club in Coventry came down with some of his lads, plus some from the Leicester Phoenix Scooter Club. They’re here for about three hours and it was amazing.
“We put pictures on Facebook and there were that many people saying ‘where was my invite?’ So next time it’ll be different – there’ll be a lot of scooters.”
And before long, Pregg hopes to join them on the road on a very special three-wheeled Lambretta GP created for him by Scott Stevens of SP Developments in Barwell.
After experimenting with a Piaggio Nippy, Pregg spotted the machine for sale on eBay.
“The Nippy was more like a little chariot than a proper scooter, and I only used it once – the first time I went on the road I nearly shat myself it had been so long,” he says. “Then I saw this, a proper scooter that had been modified to tow a coffin trailer for mod funerals.
“It was all black with a towbar on the back – it was nothing like this. I bought it off the cuff, but it had a standard seat on it, no electrics, nothing.
“We took it up to Scott, and the man is an absolute genius. He’s so knowledgeable it’s just unbelievable.”
The Lambretta was stripped down to its bare bones, and you can see the whole build process on the SP Developments website.
As well as the bespoke, liquid-cooled engine, Scott grafted a wheelchair seat onto a specially made frame, added two-into-one brakes, a custom ECU and electronics, custom rear suspension and fuel tank, a stereo system, handmade exhaust, Minilite rear wheels, foot holders, and a rear rack to carry Pregg’s wheelchair. A reverse gear will make the trike easier to manoeuvre.
“The work has cost about £25,000,” he says. “There’s over 1,000 hours gone into that. There have been some teething problems, but nothing major – it just needs a proper run.
“The key for me is that it’s a proper scooter – it’s still recognisably got the shape.”
Waiting for the all-clear
Pregg is waiting for the all-clear from doctors in Sheffield to use a slide-board to mount the scooter – at the moment, he uses a ceiling hoist to get out of bed, where he has to spend 16 hours out of every 24 to avoid the pressure sores that dogged him in 2022 and resulted in a long stay in hospital.
“I can’t afford to go into hospital again, so I don’t want to start slide-boarding until I’ve got the OK,” he says. “But I can’t wait to get out on it.”
Eight years since his life was put on hold in the horrific accident that shattered his body, Pregg is ready to hit the road again and resume the way of life he thought had gone forever.
Photographs by Simon Finlay.
Scooter stories is a series of articles exploring the lives and experiences of different types of scooter riders and collectors. More stories will be added in the coming months. Click on the Scooter Stories category link to read more.
