I’m not a big car enthusiast nor am I an aficionado of design but when I came across this collection of rusting Citroëns it immediately struck me just how different these cars were to anything that came before or have come since.

Tucked away behind Dalton Mills in Keighley these relics of a bygone motoring era have long since been stripped of anything valuable and are now just left to rot.

I’ve never owned a Citroën but they are extremely distinctive. It is as if the French designers, with a stereotypical Gallic shrug, said “This is a French car. It is not like your cars. so if you don’t like it…”.

From what I remember these cars (is it a Citroën DS?) had a button which when pressed lowered and raised the rear suspension. I remember seeing this in action as a kid and thinking “Wow! How futuristic is this?!”. Quite what the point of it was I don’t know, and since no other manufacturer has ever done the same I suspect there was actually little point to it.

So now these cars sit behind a Yorkshire mill awaiting what?