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In November 1906 , a Mr Rolls and a Mr Royce joined forces on a certain automotive project. For Jonathan Glancey, it's still the best car in the world

Here it comes, purring down the street, the best car in the world. It's a Rolls-Royce, of course, a 1974 jobbie painted Persil white. It's owned by Barry Reynolds who runs a hire-car business specialising in weddings and "those special occasions to cherish and remember" in Peckham, south London.

"It's a handsome motor," says Barry, squeezed into a shiny blue two-piece that has seen better days, but set off nattily with a carnation buttonhole and a fake Hermes tie. "She comes from H & H, the auction whatsit. I wouldn't go above seven grand; the hammer came down at six eight fifty, not too bad for a Shadow. Mind you, that was without the grand for a paint job - you've got to have white for a wedding. There's been a nicker or two for the mechanicals, but, put it this way, she's a royal earner and, what can you say, a Rolls is the business, ain't it?"

You can't say more than that, and few people do. A Rolls-Royce - whether you know it as a Rolls, a Royce or a Roller - is the best car in the world, not because it goes the fastest or handles the best, but because it remains the car that most people choose to see them in and out of the world and up the aisle once or twice in between. A Rolls-Royce is far more than a car; it's a country house on wheels, and like any self-respecting Georgian pile it even has a front end based on a Greek or Roman temple. The sexy Art Nouveau stainless-steel statuette on top is called "The Spirit of Ecstasy".

A Mercedes-Benz, a BMW or a Jaguar might be superior in all sorts of ways, but a trip in a Rolls is a thing apart: immensely comfortable and reassuring.

For the few minutes that Barry Reynolds's newly marrieds are wafted through the streets of south-east London in a well-used white Silver Shadow, they will feel like queen and consort, noticed by, yet apart from, the Saturday shopping crowds along Rye Lane, wafted to champagne, cake and speeches in sybaritic silence. Perhaps they can even hear the clock ticking as the big car gathers speed. This is an old Rolls-Royce myth, but then the cars from Crewe are supported as much by myth as they are by supple suspension.

Of one thing we can be sure, however. Rolls Royce is 90 years old this week. Frederick Henry Royce (1863-1933), the self-made son of a Lincolnshire miller, and the Hon Charles Stewart Rolls (1877-1910), pilot, racing car driver and third son of Lord Llangattock, set up Rolls-Royce Ltd in October 1906. In fact they had first met three years earlier at the Great Central Hotel in Manchester, although Royce, never a society man, was loath to do so. But he had been attempting to build the best car in the world for much the same time. Rolls gave Royce social contacts and a PR input of incalculable value: Royce gave Rolls the Silver Ghost, the finest car yet built. Together they took the automotive world by storm and created a legend as much as a make of car. It was their year, 1906. Not only did they set up the company and give birth to the Silver Ghost, but Rolls drove to victory at the important TT race (average speed, 39.3mph). Congratulated by the editor of the Autocar, he wrote back, characteristically: "I would like to thank the Autocar ... but as I had nothing to do but sit there and wait until the car got to the finish, the credit is obviously due to Mr Royce, the designer and builder."

Rolls followed victory at the TT by winning a five-mile race at the Empire City Track, New York, and from then on, the United States became Rolls- Royce's biggest overseas market.

The Rolls I am driving today would not be home on the racing track. She (yes, I'm sorry but this car is a duchess in Fifties' twin-set and pearls) is a 1956 Silver Cloud 1, to me the last of the pure-bred Royce-Rolls. Yes, I have got the names the right way round. This stately galleon of a car bears all the hallmarks of Henry Royce himself. The cars that followed, fine in their way, belonged to a different age, one that brought the American- influenced engines, garish colour schemes and, in 1975, the truly horrid Carmargue, Lady Penelope's car from Thunderbirds brought excruciatingly to life and shipped almost exclusively to the Middle-East.

It was that car and that market that gave Rolls-Royce a bad name in the eyes of its traditional buyers (landed gentry, rich Yanks, Italian "airport" counts, Shanghai millionaires), and it was then that the much-loved Royce became a "Roller", to be associated in the societyless Eighties with Essex builders, Middlesex plasterers and cut-price auctions sending cars Barry Reynolds's way in Peckham for weddings and "those special occasions to cherish and remember".

The Silver Cloud wafts me from Peckham north of the Thames in near silence. She would cost you about pounds 20,000. Royces of a certain age are always more expensive than younger Rollers. John Blatchley (Rolls-Royce's first in- house stylist, now 82 and cultivating his garden in Hastings), describes the Silver Cloud as a "flying drawing room".

Originally he drew up a much more modern car, but this was rejected by the RR board: the shape of the car I'm guiding through the Blackwall Tunnel and up to meet my friend Stella in Highgate was, he says, sketched in 10 minutes. True or myth? What does it matter, especially as the old girl accelerates smoothly back up to 60, I really can hear the clock ticking.

Stella, an astronomer, owns a Silver Shadow bought a few years ago for less than pounds 10,000. She is lucky: this Roller is a good one and has cost her little to run. "The only thing I don't like about it," she says, "is that I get men-in-suits who drive company Fords and Vauxhalls calling me a rich bitch at service stations: I might drive a Silver Shadow, but I'm not even close to being rich. I'd just hate to drive the sort of car the motor industry expects young women to drive, that's all."

Classic Rolls-Royce dealers such as PJ Fischer and Frank Dale in London advise against buying cheap Shadows and Spirits, hinting that a poor pounds 10,000 car will cost as much against within the first year of ownership to put right. This has not stopped Stella, because she, like any Rolls-Royce owner, enjoys the extraordinary sense of other-worldliness you revel in as you pilot one of these great cars through raging seas of modern traffic.

Today, Rolls-Royce (now owned by Vickers, the machine-gun people) produces many more Bentleys than Rolls-Royces. The Bentley is the proverbial iron- fist-in-a-velvet glove and has an entirely different feel from its double- barrelled siblings. So much so that Rolls-Royce is currently working towards providing a bespoke design service for RR customers, treating the cars, once again as "flying drawing rooms".

I had to admit as I point the Silver Cloud back home, safe as country houses in foul late autumn weather, that the latest cars from Crewe are superb and ones that Mr Royce and the Hon Charles Stewart would have been proud to lend their names to.

Royce died of overwork (the only time he could find for his hobby - growing fruit trees and roses - was at night by the light of portable electric lamps he designed for the purpose) and Rolls crashed a Wright bi-plane in a flying competition at Bournemouth aged 33. He felt from just 20ft, but it was enough to kill him. "I never knew that," says Barry Reynolds, giving his Persil white Shadow a polish. "Shame, really, he could have a nice little line in the wedding business. I mean, he had the right sort of motors, didn't he?"