Ten Years of the XJS Soft Tops Club — Our Anniversary Gathering at Avro

There are some Club events which are simply another enjoyable day out with our cars, and there are others which represent something rather more, and for the XJS Soft Tops Club, the Northern Jaguar Show at the Avro Heritage Museum in Woodford was definitely the latter.

2026 marks the 10th Anniversary of the XJS Soft Tops Club, and earlier in the year we decided that rather than try to organise a completely separate event of our own, we would make the Northern Jaguar Show our main gathering for the anniversary year.

The Greater Manchester Region of the Jaguar Enthusiasts’ Club had already created what has become a very successful annual Jaguar show at Avro, and they kindly allocated us our own dedicated display area for the day.

We were originally given space for up to 20 XJ-SC Cabriolets and XJS Convertibles.

As the event approached, I will admit to being a little disappointed that we hadn’t managed to fill all those places. In the end, however, nine Club members brought their cars along — including members travelling considerable distances, with one making the journey from as far away as the south coast.

And once those nine cars were lined up together, the numbers really didn’t seem to matter quite so much.

They made a great display.

For a Club which exists largely online and whose members are spread not just throughout the UK but around the world, getting a collection of our cars physically together is never quite as easy as it sounds.

That made seeing the XJ-SCs and Convertibles arriving at Woodford particularly satisfying.

Our display was positioned between the Greater Manchester and Cheshire Regions of the Jaguar Enthusiasts’ Club, giving the Soft Tops Club a very visible presence amongst the wider Jaguar gathering.

We had also invested in new Club banners and display equipment for the anniversary year, so for perhaps the first time we had a display which properly announced who we were rather than simply being a collection of XJSs parked together.

After ten years of building the Club predominantly through a website, emails, forums and Facebook, there was something rather nice about seeing the Club physically represented on a show field.

Nine members. Nine cars. Club banners flying.

We were definitely there.

We couldn’t really have asked for better weather.

The sun stayed with us and brought plenty of visitors to the show, with Jaguars filling the field and surrounding parking areas.

There was an enormous variety of cars to wander around and look at, from much earlier Jaguars through the various generations of saloons and sports cars, right through to much newer models, and even included some that you don’t often see at a show – a hearse.

The show also featured anniversary displays for several parts of Jaguar history. Alongside our own XJS Soft Tops Club anniversary, there was a particularly impressive gathering of X-Types marking their 25th Anniversary.

I’m pleased to say that our collection of XJSs attracted plenty of interest as well, and one of the pleasures of displaying these cars together is seeing just how different supposedly similar XJSs can actually be. Colours, interiors, wheels, roofs and individual details all tell part of each car’s history.

Our line-up gave visitors a chance to see both XJ-SC Cabriolets and full XJS Convertibles together — the two models which brought this Club into existence in the first place.

Of course, this wasn’t an ordinary show field.

Towering over proceedings was Avro’s magnificent Vulcan, which provides a backdrop that is difficult for almost any other car show venue to compete with.

At midday the Vulcan’s engines were started and its bomb bays opened as part of the day’s programme, providing one of those moments when virtually everybody at the show stops what they are doing and looks in the same direction.

The museum itself added another dimension to the day, telling the story of Avro and the extraordinary aircraft associated with Woodford.

There was also live music from Bandage during the day, talks and presentations, and plenty of opportunity simply to wander between the cars and talk to other owners.

The Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust brought to the show their XJ220 and the XJ40 Fire Car (Silverstone Grand Prix Circuit), placed for the most part of the day under the Vulcan. Then when they had departed there was a line up cars which were effectively the forefathers to our XJS, from an SS100 though to an XK150, all sat neatly parked under the Vulcan.

And that, for me, is ultimately what these events are about.

One of the unusual things about running an international online Club is that I can correspond with somebody for years without ever actually meeting them. Their names become familiar through registrations, emails, forum posts and Facebook conversations, while their cars become familiar through photographs.

Then eventually somebody walks across a show field and says hello and our 10th Anniversary gathering provided exactly that opportunity.

Members were able to spend the day talking about their cars, comparing experiences, examining one another’s solutions to the peculiarities of XJS ownership and generally doing what car enthusiasts do when placed in a field full of Jaguars.

Visitors also stopped at our display to look at the cars and talk about the Club.

For something which started ten years ago simply because I felt there ought to be somewhere specifically for owners of the open-top XJS models, seeing our own Club display amongst a major Jaguar show was quite a milestone. We even had our new Club Banners on display at each end of the line up of our cars.

The XJS Soft Tops Club has changed enormously during those ten years.

What began as a relatively simple way of bringing owners together has developed into a worldwide membership, with our website now containing Car Albums, photographs, technical discussions, articles, events and the accumulated knowledge and experiences of members.

But the cars remain the reason it exists, and standing at Avro looking along the line of Cabriolets and Convertibles was a useful reminder of that. Every one of those cars has its own history. Every owner has their own stories of journeys, repairs, improvements, breakdowns and occasionally wondering why on earth they bought an old Jaguar in the first place.

Collectively, those stories are our Club.

So my biggest thank you goes to the members who brought their cars along, particularly those who travelled significant distances to join us. Collectively you turned what had been an idea on a screen and an allocated patch of grass into a proper XJS Soft Tops Club anniversary gathering.

Thank you also to Pete Smith and everyone from the Greater Manchester Region JEC who put an enormous amount of work into organising the Northern Jaguar Show and who invited us to become part of it.

The organisation required to put on an event of this size is largely invisible to those of us who simply arrive on the Sunday morning, park our cars and enjoy ourselves.

We were very pleased to have been invited and thoroughly enjoyed being part of the day.

I don’t think we need to finish our tenth year by looking backwards for too long.

If anything, Avro demonstrated what I would like the next chapter of the Club to be about.

We now have the website and infrastructure to preserve information about these increasingly historic cars. What we need is for more members to use it — to add their cars, photographs, experiences and stories so that knowledge doesn’t disappear as cars and owners change hands.

The nine cars at Avro represented only a tiny proportion of the XJ-SCs and XJS Convertibles belonging to members around the world.

But, for one sunny Sunday in Woodford in Cheshire, UK, they represented all of us rather well.

Ten years of the XJS Soft Tops Club — and still plenty more road ahead.