The Zookeepers: Thomas Howarth

Car collecting is a cruel drug. ‘I literally can’t help myself,’ confesses the self-proclaimed addict, Thomas Howarth, just 30 years old but 15 cars deep into an eclectic ‘supercar plus tat’ collection.

You may know him from his social media presence (@horsepower_hunters on Instagram), but behind the algorithm the passion runs deep enough to fill a driveway, a storage facility and an industrial unit, behind which live the grizzliest pair of R129 series Mercedes-Benz SLs I’ve ever seen. Quite the leap from the first episode of this Zookeeper series when I went to visit the fabulous Loh Collection in Germany.

It wasn’t always apparent this would be young Tommy’s destiny, and there was little I could discern in the family history to suggest this future of wayward obsession. Born and raised in Cumbria by a pair of GP parents, the family cars were both Ford Focuses (dad a Ghia and mum a Zetec, if you’re asking). Academically brilliant, Tommy aced his A-levels and went to UCL to read Physics. So far, so good. So how did things go so terribly wrong?