Nostalgia is not what it used to be, they say. Not so sure about that when it comes to nostalgia on wheels. Take next month’s 50th anniversary celebrations of the MG Car Club’s Vintage Register, for instance, when dozens of fogies, young and old — and some doubtless dressed for the part in tweeds and moustaches — will take to the roads around their precious cars’ birthplace of Abingdon.

They will find those roads less crowded than of yore too, since, I am told, the number of cars on the nation’s highways and byways is now decreasing for the first time ever since the war — thanks to the increasing price of petrol.

Good job too, they’ll probably say (and I would agree with them), as they tell each other that most economic ills can be solved by buying things which, like good wine, good shoes, and good people, improve with age. None of this modern obsession with “newness” for them.

But wait a moment. The MG Car Club also plans to play host at the unveiling this weekend of the new MG6 Saloon at Silverstone; the first new MG to hit the market for nine years, built by MG Motor UK — a company owned by the Nanjing Automobile Corporation of China, which bought up the famous marque in 2007.

Many club members (some Chinese) are apparently delighted that the past will live again, even in zombie form. As club manager Julian White told me earlier this year: “The Chinese love the fact that we cherish the past at MG, but they find it strange because there is really no culture of used cars in China at all.”

The MG Car Club — 80 years old this year — has its premises at Kimber House, Cemetery Road, Abingdon, overlooking land occupied between 1930-1980 by the MG factory, the workplace for some 1,300 people in its heyday. The old admin block still stands there — even if, these days, it manifests itself as a timber-clad block of flats set in a sea of new houses.

The club has about 11,000 UK members (35,000 worldwide) with 1,264 living in the old Abingdon works area. Members pay £40 a year and revel in the past, drooling over such details as the octagonal dials, reflecting the MG badge, on the wooden dashboard of the 1953 MG YB which was left last year to the club by a former member and is now kept on the site.

MG came into existence as a marque in its own right, as distinct from Morris, in 1924, after Cecil Kimber, the driving force behind the company’s early success, had become sales manager at Morris Garages (MG): a division of Morris which, of course, was owned by William Morris, later Viscount Nuffield. He persuaded Mr Morris to allow him to produce more exciting cars than, say, the best-selling Bullnose Morris he already built in Oxford, and in 1929-30 the Abingdon works started doing just that.

Sadly, though, Mr Kimber, who lived in a house at 69 Oxford Road, Abingdon, now occupied by the Boundary House pub, quarreled with Lord Nuffield over an aircraft contract during the war and was sacked. In 1952, John Thornley took over, and it is his son Peter, who will name the club’s £120,000 extension The John Thornley Suite on June 11.

One man who never lived to see MG achieve the sort of cult status it enjoys today was Cecil Kimber himself. He was killed in 1945 by a freak rail accident near King’s Cross station in London, one of only two passengers to die in the collision.

Some say that MGs should only be sports cars. But the company was making saloons, like the MG YB, more than 50 years ago. So good luck to them in the future. And as for nostalgia, it is getting better and better (as long as you forget those dreadful Maestros and Metros built at Longbridge between 1982-1990).