It's All About the Bike Read Free Page A

own ‘little queen’.
    I know where to start. The bicycle frame will be made to measure and hand-built by an artisan frame-builder. Few people know this, but you can have a custom-built frame, designed to fit your body and tuned for the type of riding you do, for a lot less money than many exotic, mass-manufactured stock frames sold in shops. Sixty years ago, every large town in northern Italy, France, Belgium and Holland would have had at least one frame-builder. In Britain, where the concentration was greatest, big cities had dozens. While a handful of giant manufacturers such as Rudge-Whitworth, Raleigh and BSA in Britain, Bianchi in Italy and Peugeot in France catered for the cycling masses, small frame-builders built bikes for clubmen, racers, touring cyclists and the cognoscenti. These craftsmen made a few dozen frames a year, with great attention to detail and individual flourishes. Tim Hilton, in his loving memoir of the post-war cycling scene,
One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers,
called these hand-built frames ‘industrial folk art’. The simple tools — files, hacksaws,blowtorches and a device to hold the tubes while brazing — rooted the frame-builders in an innovative, artisan culture that dated back to the beginning of bicycle manufacturing. Even Raleigh started as a small workshop, making three bicycles a week in 1888.
    By 1951, Raleigh was making 20,000 a week. The early 1950s were dizzy heights for the bicycle industry in Europe. There were 12 million regular cyclists in Britain alone. As the major manufacturers boomed, so did the small-town frame-builders. Collectors now only remember their names — Major Nichols and Ron Cooper in Britain, Alex Singer and René Herse in France, Faliero Masi and Francesco Galmozzi in Italy, to name just a handful from the hundreds.
    Up to the end of the 1950s, the bicycle was still the main form of utility transport for working people across Europe. In Britain, cycling was also the major leisure activity. The cities emptied of young people at the weekends. The British countryside, already over-imagined by advertisers and authors, filled to bursting with eager cyclists in pursuit of bucolic bliss.
    The car was coming, though. The 3.5 million bikes sold in Britain in 1955 had dropped to 2 million by 1958. The Mini went on sale in 1959. Small frame-builders began to disappear. There was a brief revival in the 1970s, when the oil crisis created an explosion of demand in the USA. For a few years, the Americans couldn’t get their hands on British and Italian lightweight racing frames fast enough. Spellbound young men crossed the Atlantic to learn frame-building in London and Milan. Richard Sachs, Ben Serotta and Peter Weigle — a sort of holy trinity of American frame-builders today — all apprenticed at the once renowned Witcomb Cycles in Deptford, south-east London, in the 1970s.
    By the mid-seventies, the cultural perception of the bicycle had reached a low point in Britain. It was no longer seen as a valid form of transportation: it was a toy, or worse — a pest. This viewis only seriously being revised today. When I was working as a lawyer in London in the early 1990s, I commuted to work by bicycle. Most people thought I was, at best, odd. I used to ride through Hyde Park every day: I knew most of the other bike commuters by Christian name, as there were so few of us. There was an overt sense of cyclists versus motorists on the city streets. The monthly Critical Mass rides were practically anarchist events, often involving rolling battles with the police. The heroin-chic cycle couriers were the flag carriers: they knifed through static traffic, surfing the tiny gaps, high on car fumes and the smell of seething motorists.
    The bike shop I used near Holborn was a favourite of this warrior-courier class. One Friday night I dropped in after work, to pick up my bike. I had sheared off one of the cranks. The mechanic wheeled