The Smallest Cog, Richard Hammond’s Real Car Restoration Business

A real restoration business, not just a TV set

The Smallest Cog is a classic-car restoration workshop Richard Hammond founded in Herefordshire in 2021, realising what he has described as a long-standing ambition to run a proper restoration and repair business rather than simply present one on television. He put some of his own money behind it directly, in part by selling his own Porsche 911T to help fund a state-of-the-art dust-collection booth for the workshop.

How it started

The Smallest Cog grew out of a private arrangement: Neil Greenhouse, his son Anthony and brother Andrew had been looking after Hammond’s own classic car collection. When the family lost the rented premises they were working from in Hereford, Hammond suggested turning the arrangement into a proper business that would take on outside restoration work as well as his own cars. The workshop is based on an industrial estate in Rotherwas, just outside Hereford, roughly half an hour from Hammond’s home near Ross-on-Wye.

Who runs the workshop

Day-to-day restoration work is led by the Greenhouse family — Neil, his son Anthony and brother Andrew — the same team that looked after Hammond’s own cars before the business existed in its current form. That existing working relationship is part of why the arrangement grew into a proper business rather than staying an informal one: Hammond already knew the standard of work first-hand before any cameras were involved, and the show has kept the same core team throughout its run rather than assembling a cast for television.

What the workshop does

The Smallest Cog handles the full range of classic-car restoration work: bodywork, mechanical rebuilds and paintwork, taking on projects for clients as a working business rather than a set built purely for filming.

Notable projects

Restoration work featured on the show has included a unique Delahaye, a classic Bentley adapted to run on synthetic fuel, an Aston Martin painted pink for charity, and a Mercedes SL once owned by Debbie McGee, given to her by her late husband, the magician Paul Daniels. The team has also taken cars from the workshop out to compete, including a 1960s sports car raced at Silverstone.

The Smallest Cog on screen

The day-to-day running of the workshop is documented in the television series Richard Hammond’s Workshop, a Discovery+ UK series that debuted in 2021 — see the full TV career record for where it sits alongside his other credits. The show follows real projects moving through the workshop rather than a scripted format, without a studio audience or a traditional broadcast slot.

The first series ran six episodes; since then the show has settled into a longer run of eight to ten hour-long episodes per series, typically premiering in the autumn. A fifth series aired on Discovery+ from October 2025, keeping it a recurring fixture of the platform’s UK factual lineup rather than a one-off special.

Unlike DriveTribe, which ran for five years before closing, The Smallest Cog remains an active, ongoing business as of the most recent series of the TV show — the two ventures sit at very different points in their lifecycle despite both growing out of the same post-Top-Gear period of Hammond’s career.