Beautiful Dormobile Show Car

Dormobiles are a type of camper van modification that first became popular, originally in the UK in their heyday back in the 50′s and 60′s and have been around ever since. They are effectively a conversion of a car or van into a vehicle that can be used for camping and sleeping in, the name being derived from the word ‘Dormer’ or sleeper.

“Dormobile” was originally the trade name of one of the most successful companies of the time – Martin Walter Limited, and some dormobile aficionados will not accept that a car is a true dormobile unless the modification was done by the Martin Walter factory with official parts, however, it has now come to be used as a generic terms, just like the word Hoover for vacuum cleaners.

The first Dormobile was made from a Bedford CA Van, but the modifications became so popular that all sorts of other manufacturers vehicles were converted, from VW campers to Ford Transits, Land Rovers to British Leylands.

Several other manufacturers of conversions sprang up with another of the most popular being Westfalia, who specialized particularly in VW Campers and the like, but I’ll cover these in more details on another page.

Dormobiles were successful in their original time as they allowed the working man the chance to use his everyday van to go camping without the need for a separate caravan trailer, at a time when holidays abroad and air travel was prohibitively expensive for the working class. Once cheap foreign holidays were introduced for the mass market in the 1970′s the idea of camping fell away in popularity, and Martin Walter eventually went bust.

People still love to use dormobiles even now, and they are popular with lots of people, who cherish the old cars, and several manufacturers still offer new cars with the camper conversion, and companies still sell conversion kits for them, which is great to see.