Harry Metcalfe – Detailed Biography

Harry Metcalfe is a car enthusiast and a popular YouTuber.

He is the man behind the YouTube channels, Harry’s garage and Harry’s Farm.

Harry is also a farmer and the founder of Evo magazine.

Introduction

Harry Metcalfe was born on 17 November 1958 and hails from Birkenhead, England. He grew up in Wales and Liverpool.

Harry was into design, used to interact with designers and attend fashion shows like Paris Fashion Week and Milan Fashion Week.

Both his father and grandfather were horse dealers in Yorkshire.

Harry’s father, Charles, studied Fashion at Liverpool College of Art and was a teacher and farmer before becoming a fashion designer.

It started at 10

Harry used to live on the Bell Bank farm in Bentham, North Yorkshire where one of his cousins, Roger, had a bike barn.

He started visiting the bike barn at 10 and started tinkering with the bikes and their engines and fell in love with motorcycles.

After his parents bought an off-grid cottage in Wales in the middle of the forest, Harry asked for a horse, even though he knew nothing about them, as his father and grandfather were horse dealers.

But he dropped the idea as his father felt he couldn’t look after a horse.

So, Harry bought a couple of 50cc bikes for £15, after passing his eleven-plus examination and started escaping on them into the 70-acre woodland in Wales.

Later, he bought a 200-scrambler motorcycle for £27 from Roger and started collecting on-road and off-road motorcycles.

Harry also learnt repairing motorcycles and at 16, he started repairing others’ motorcycles.

Cars, magazines & photography

Harry’s father used to drive him across Europe and they travelled to Yugoslavia in a Saab 96.

His father was into Citroën cars and had a Dyane 6. Harry tried to convince him to upgrade to a Range Rover but couldn’t succeed as his father was horrified with their fuel consumption.

Later, Harry inherited the Citroën Dyane 6 from his family and this was his first car.

He swapped this car for a MGB GT but didn’t like driving it. So, at 17, he got into Volkswagen Beetles, started tweaking them and became obsessed with cars.

Harry spent a fortune tweaking Beetles, making them go faster and also bought his father a Volkswagen Beetle 1200.

He fell in love with motoring, thanks to the vroom of car engines and driving cars around the off-grid cottage.

At the time, Harry was into Beetles and beach buggies and read magazines on them and didn’t know of other cars.

Later, he started reading a variety of car magazines like Fast Lane and Performance Car.

When Harry saw a Mazda MX-5 along with a Lotus Elan on the cover of the Performance Car, he fell in love with the Elan and bought one in the late 80s.

He passed the driving test at 17 and at the time, he loved the Triumph GT6 and one of his friends bought one.

But Harry’s mother didn’t like him in the GT6 and insisted that he wore a crash helmet in the car. He used to oblige only to remove the helmet at the end of the road.

Harry developed an interest in photography when his father gave him a Rolleiflex with Carl Zeiss lenses.

He was a photographer for a while but wasn’t able to make a career in photography. Nevertheless, the photography knowledge later helped him to shoot beautiful pictures for his Evo magazine.

From farm to cars

Initially, Harry wanted to study Automotive Engineering with British Leyland at Loughborough but couldn’t, as he didn’t do well in the Maths A Level.

As he loved farming and frequently took holiday jobs on farms, his father enrolled him to study for a 4-year HND Agriculture course, in the late 70s, at Shuttleworth College in England.

Harry worked in a dairy farm at 18.

After graduating in 1980, he secured a job as an on-farm grain-buyer with Grainec company.

Later, as Harry felt that he could do the grain buying in a better way, he became a self-employed grain-buyer in 1984 and also started trading lime, renting grounds and sheep farming.

After growing a flock of sheep, he got tired of the arduous work. So, he gave up sheep farming and shifted to arable farming in Harpenden.

Initially, Harry started renting out small pieces of land and then expanded to 600 acres and then to 2000 acres.

At the time, he had a Saab 99 Turbo car and later, he also bought Lotus Elan Sprint and BMW M3 E30 cars.

He participated in the CCC National Hill-climb Championship, in 1993, with his Lotus Elan Sprint and came runner-up.

A year later, Harry traded his BMW M3 E30 for a blue Maserati Ghibli Cup. He became the first person in the UK to own a Ghibli Cup and was impressed by the car.

At the time, the Ghibli Cup launched only in Italy and not in the UK. But he ordered the car, a right-hand drive one and rang a few journalists and offered the car for them to try.

Thanks to this, Harry came in contact with automotive journalists like Jeremy Clarkson, Steve Cropley, Brett Frazier, John Barker and Dickie Mead.

Harry got featured in the Performance Car magazine as Jeremy Clarkson, who was working for the magazine at the time, invited him to participate in the road tests with his Ghibli Cup.

As he was doing arable farming, he had a few months of free time in which he did the road tests for the Performance Car. He also did group tests for Auto Express.

Taking the leap

While doing a group test on BMW Z3, in 1998, Harry learnt from John Barker that the Performance Car magazine was ceasing its operations.

As Harry was interested in magazines, he decided to launch his own car magazine and fill the space of Performance Car.

He saw that even though Performance Car was being shut down, the magazine was being sold in decent numbers and had a decent readership.

So, Harry wanted to launch his magazine into the space of Performance Car which had proven sales on the news stand.

He wanted to launch the magazine in October as the last issue of Performance Car was in July 1998 to attract as many readers of the Performance Car as possible.

Before deciding to launch his magazine, Harry was to buy a place in Italy. But as the magazine opportunity came up, he decided to not to buy the place.

But he learnt that he had to either buy the place at the quoted rate or he had to make up the difference when someone else buys the property.

So, even though it was a big financial commitment, he decided to both buy the property and launch the magazine.

Harry, along with four other motoring journalists moved into a sweaty office in Stanford. Even though he had no knowledge of the publishing world, he launched Evo, in October 1998, along with those motoring journalists.

The working title of the magazine was Road Sport, but he didn’t like the name and there was a list containing other names like GTO and GTR.

When Harry read about the upcoming Maserati Quattroporte Evoluzione in an Autocar column, he decided to christen his magazine Evo.

Even though he had a good relationship with banks, he couldn’t get a loan for his magazine as the banks didn’t believe in his upcoming magazine.

But thanks to his farming business, he took a loan of £275,000 on the pretext of setting up a grain building and launched Evo with it.

Launching the magazine was an expensive affair as Harry had to pay for the paper and print upfront and had to pay £45,000 just for the computers. The computers were more expensive than his £38,000 Maserati Ghibli Cup.

At the time, he had rented 2,000 acres for farming but found it difficult to farm. So, he prioritised the magazine.

The first issue of Evo was published in November 1998 for £3 or US $7.50. And 24,000 copies of the first issue were sold in the UK and 7,000 copies were sold overseas.

It featured a Maserati 3200 GT on the cover page. At first, they wanted to feature a group of cars which represented Evo but later featured the 3200 GT as they got invited to its launch.

There was no marketing budget for Evo and the only marketing done was placing some Evo pamphlets under the windscreen wipers of cars at Silverstone Car Park. Also, Harry and John appeared on Channel 4 to promote the magazine.

Magazines like emap, Future and Haymarket opined that Evo couldn’t succeed as it was a car magazine launched by a farmer. But Evo’s first issue sold out.

Evo wasn’t financially viable even when the second issue was published and he was running out of money while publishing the third issue.

Thankfully, Evo became financially viable in 1999 when its third issue became hugely popular. It sold more than the Performance Car. And from that point on, Evo never looked back and became self-financing.

As Harry and his team were car enthusiasts and as they had good relationships with car manufacturers, they loved working on the magazine.

Evo’s website, evo.co.uk, was launched in 1998, the same year Google was launched.

Harry worked as an Editorial Director for the magazine.

Registration woes

After the naming ceremony of Evo, Harry went on a holiday where he met his lawyer friend and learnt that the name of the magazine must be registered.

So, Harry registered the name, very close to the publication date. But to his horror, he learnt that another publisher had registered the Evo name around four months before him.

By then, he had already paid up front for printing. So, he approached the council to decide whether he should distribute the magazine or not.

Harry presented the transcription evidence of him discussing the Evo magazine with his colleagues to the council.

His solicitor approved him to work on the magazine and release it as the other publisher hadn’t started working.

Harry was told that even if the other publisher contested Evo, he would have six months of time to reply and by that time, he can establish the magazine and create goodwill. And the other publisher couldn’t implicate him.

Even though he didn’t face any issues from the other publisher, he had to pay £24,000 for the services of the solicitor.

Selling Evo

Evo was acquired by Dennis Publishing in April 2001. Initially, Future Publishing wanted to acquire Evo, but Dennis Publishing acquired it in a counter bid.

Harry sold Evo as he believed that it could attract the right talent under a much bigger publisher.

Currently, Evo is owned by Carwow Studio Limited.

Harry left Evo in September 2013 and worked as an Independent Consultant for Jaguar Land Rover Special Operations.

Later, he purchased the Octane magazine. This magazine is currently owned by Hothouse Publishing Ltd.

Harry wrote for the Octane magazine and The Sunday Times but later shifted his focus towards his YouTube channels.

Harry’s garage & Harry’s Farm

Realising the popularity of videos, while running the Evo magazine, Harry started producing videos. Initially, he hosted them on his server but as it was expensive, he shifted to YouTube.

As the videos weren’t monetized at the time, he couldn’t justify paying for a film crew. So, he used to stick a camera in the windscreen of the car and shoot himself driving the car.

Harry continued producing videos as it cost him nothing and he used to post videos with minimal edits.

At the time, he was inspired by a documentary in which a man, with a GoPro on his shoulder, was feeding grizzly bears. Even though the video was wobbly, Harry was able to enjoy the documentary.

And this inspired Harry to shoot low-production videos as he felt that the viewers will appreciate his storytelling more than the video quality. As the viewers loved his videos, he continued publishing.

Harry has been publishing videos on Harry’s garage YouTube channel since 2014. Currently, this channel has more than 880K subscribers.

In October 2019, he featured on a podcast on the Collecting Cars YouTube channel and this greatly helped in the growth of his channel. Also, his channel’s views exploded during the lockdown.

Harry’s unique and popular videos in which he took a Ferrari Testarossa to the Sahara on a 2000-mile adventure and drove his Rolls Royce Shadow to the Arctic in the middle of winter helped in the success of his channel.

In 2018, he published a video on a combine harvester and a tractor on Harry’s garage channel and as his viewers loved those videos, he started working on his Harry’s Farm YouTube channel from August 2019.

On this channel, he shows his farm life in his 280-acre mixed Cotswolds farm. Currently, Harry’s Farm has over 190K subscribers.

In 2020, he won Automotive Influencer of the Year award. In 2023, he received the Best use of Social Media award from Octane Magazine.

Harry edits his videos himself and loves the process of video production.

He feels it easy to share his content on a global scale through YouTube compared to the magazines where he had to ship tons of paper across the world and wait for months to receive payments.

Also, unlike magazines, the YouTube videos never go out of stock and people around the world get to instantly watch his videos the time they are published.

Garage & vehicle collection

Harry thought of using his barn to store grain, fertilizers and seed but started parking his cars and motorcycles in it. He likes parking all his cars in his spacious garage, under one roof.

Harry’s substantial car collection includes a Lancia Fulvia, Lotus Elan, Fiat 500, Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, Ferrari Testarossa, Lamborghini Countach, Porsche 930 Turbo, Jaguar F-Type Project 7, Jaguar XE SV Project 8, McLaren 650S and Range Rover L322.

His family car is a Maserati Levante and farm car is a Range Rover L322.

Harry’s favourite car of all-time is the Ferrari F50 and his other favourites are Ferrari Testarossa, McLaren F1 and Lotus Elan, Mclaren 650S, Countach, Porsche Turbo and Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow.

He has motorcycles like the 1980 Kawasaki Z1300, 1979 Honda CBX and Dakar bikes in his garage. His favourites are Honda CBX and Kawasaki triple two-stroke.

Harry also had a boat collection but he sold them due to high insurance costs.

He loves riding motorcycles, along with his son, in the salt lake of Morocco.

Personal life

Harry is married to Patricia, a Canadian. She helps him with filming videos.

This couple has a daughter and a son, Charlie. He studied from Royal Agricultural University and currently works as a Director at Metcalfe Cars.

Harry loves farming and watching the seasons go by. He doesn’t listen to music but enjoys listening to Formula 1 sport live on the radio.

So, how are you inspired by the success story of Harry Metcalfe?

Share with me in the comment section below.