Brompton Bicycle

And if you feel tempted at this point to cast my piece aside, unread, on the quite reasonable grounds that not only do you not like bicycles, or cycling, but you especially revile the ghastly middle-aged-mannish gadget obsession that you already feel emanating from my prose in great waves, then I say: desist! Give me a chance! Read on, and if I can't convince you by the end of these 2,000 words that a Brompton folding bicycle is not only a superior means of locomotion, and a perfect antidote to the stresses of the modern world, but also a means of achieving a deeper harmony with place and culture than you've hitherto achieved, then I personally guarantee to come round to your house and sort out your old Allen keys – or something like that. Of course, I'd seen Brompton bicycles before – there's the one the redoubtable travel correspondent of this very newspaper, Simon Calder, holds in his by-line photo, and I'd also seen chaps and chapesses toddling about on them in the London streets, but I'd never really noticed one before that fateful day in 2002, when, cycling down the Wandsworth Road, near my home in south London, I saw a man on the kerb with his arm lightly resting on the saddle of a lime-green bicycle-shaped contrivance that was yet not a bicycle, for the back wheel seemed to have flipped forward and tucked itself in behind the front, so that the whole contraption stood up by itself. During the first few years I had the Brompton it was still an object of either curiosity or risibility. In the sticks small kids would shout and run after me, while the Tupperware men – and Melamine women – would stop me for a nerdy chat. But as Brompton have sold more bikes (sales have more than doubled in the past six years), the sight of full-sized people pedalling about on tiny wheels has become less worthy of comment. Many bikeys criticise the Brompton for being "an engineer's bike", and it's true that Andrew Ritchie, who is the bike's only begetter, was an engineer by training, rather than a yellow jersey-wearer. Following his degree at Cambridge, he was kicking round without much to do. His father knew the Bickerton family and Ritchie looked at their bike and decided he could do better. I don't know exactly what his eureka moment consisted of, but it must've hinged on the double-jointed fold of the bicycle. Before the Brompton (named for the Brompton Oratory, near where Ritchie lives), foldaways folded in half lengthwise, then the saddle and handlebars folded down. It was Ritchie's genius to conceive of the bike folding in on itself simultaneously lengthways and vertically into an almost foetal shape. The Ritchie story is a classic tale of cranky British inventing: the young man with a brilliant idea but no funding. The first 400 bikes were built in a jobbing shop during the early 1980s, while Ritchie funded the enterprise by doing extravagant landscape gardening for large corporates. The bikes were made by hand, and at a loss. Ritchie knew he had a great product, but he was on the point of giving up when an entrepreneur arrived who had the financial nous and the enthusiasm to take the bike forward. Brompton now operates out of a factory in Brentford, west London, sales are projected to increase 30 per cent a year for the next three years, and demand is comfortably outstripping supply. Naturally, despite my love affair with the Brompton I'd been unfaithful in my mind. The thing is, once you've got a lightweight, folding bicycle, you want one that's lighter and still more foldable. I trawled the net, having heard of a Japanese machine that weighed nearly two kilos less than my Brompton. I stopped other foldaway riders in the streets and shamelessly examined their bikes. I bored the blokes in the bike shop still more than I normally do. But nothing I discovered convinced me that there was a better machine than the Brompton. Still, a man grows older, and my Brompton, although a lovely machine, was beginning to feel a little like a