About Us

The Donalds Garage Group is one of East Anglia’s longest serving car dealerships with four locations and seven franchises throughout the region, representing three Mazda sites, two Kia, Volvo and MG dealerships. We are part of the Central Garage Group of Companies, a group of franchised and non-franchised dealerships who sell and maintain cars and motorbikes. In 2022 Central Garage Group works with 12 franchises in 7 locations with 18 franchise outlets. The group is privately owned by the Hamblin family, which was originally founded by Bob Stanley Hamblin post WW2. Their Uppingham site is the original dealership Bob left to his son Peter, who then went on to grow the company over the decades changing the automotive focus from haulage to cars and motorbikes. Peter’s daughter Sam joined the company in the late 1990s and took over the reins in 2015.

The Donalds Garage Group grew after Peter Hamblin acquired two further dealerships in Ipswich and Bury St Edmunds in 2004.  In 2020 Donalds Group will have been working with the Mazda franchise for over 40 years and are very proud to be one of the longest-serving dealership groups in their network, currently totalling 3 Mazda dealerships.

The Volvo franchise was added alongside Mazda at the Ipswich site on West End Road in 2009 and the two franchises soon outgrew their premises. In November 2016 Sam Hamblin took the opportunity to buy some land in the new Futura Park development in the town and the Donalds team went on to develop and open two state-of-the-art flagship showrooms, which opened in the summer of 2018.   In 2022, we welcomed two more new additions to the group, our second Kia franchise in the form of Kia Ipswich in addition to our fourth Mazda franchise, Donalds Mazda Norwich.