RUC Hotspur Armoured Land Rover

The RUC's first armoured Land Rovers were the Shorland armoured cars of the 1960s; when the Troubles brought petrol bombs and gunfire to the streets of Belfast in 1969 the force needed protected patrol vehicles in quantity. In the mid-1970s, alongside three Shorts SB301 armoured personnel vehicles, the RUC designed its own conversion: an armoured steel kit, made in Wales, that its workshops could bolt onto a commercial Series III 109 chassis. The kit was called Hotspur after the type of armour plate, and Hotspurs were built in bulk in the late 1970s. When the Series III chassis wore out, around a hundred Hotspur bodies were transplanted onto the coil-sprung One-Ten and became the Tangi.

Bob Morrison photographed this one, IXI 8636, with a Stage 1 V8 companion CXI 2389, inside Grosvenor Road police station in 1988: a hard-top 109 with the Stage 1's flush V8 front, in RUC grey, with flat ballistic plates bolted over the doors and body sides, small vision windows in the rear body, a second armoured roof standing off the original on spacers, armoured rear doors with vision slots, wire mesh guards over the windscreen, grille and headlamps, and a mesh-fronted guard box ahead of the bumper against petrol bombs. The registry's model, as the review asked, is built from its Tangi — the same Hotspur body — recoloured to RUC grey without the police markings, with the guard skirt and wing mirrors of the 1988 photograph; the number of Hotspurs built and this vehicle's fate are not recorded in the source.