In the late 1970s British Leyland purchased the site to convert it into a vehicle development facility, and proving ground and it became the headquarters of BL Technology (BLT).
[1] The ownership of the site passed, along with what was by then called the Rover Group, to British Aerospace in 1988, and subsequently in 1994 to BMW.
In 2000, the site was included in the sale by BMW of the Land Rover business to Ford.
Ford, which at that time also owned Jaguar Cars and Aston Martin, established the new Aston Martin headquarters and design, development and production facilities on the site, and started to use the Land Rover facilities for some Jaguar work.
When Ford sold Aston Martin into private ownership in 2007, the Aston Martin facilities on the site were included in the deal, the remainder of the site continuing to be occupied by their, by then, integrated Jaguar Land Rover development operations.