It's All About the Bike (3 page)

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 view
is 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 the bike out of the workshop, past three couriers sharing a can of Tennent's Extra. The old crank, a lump of aluminium, was strapped to my handlebar with a round of tape.

‘What's that for?' I said, pointing at the old crank. I looked at the mechanic who looked at the couriers, who looked at the mechanic, who looked at me. Clearly I was supposed to know what it was for, even if I was standing there in a grey pinstripe suit. After a long pause, the middle courier looked at me with wild eyes and said: ‘You . . . stick . . . it . . . through . . . the . . . windscreen . . . of . . . a . . . fucking . . . car!'

Moving to the Brecon Beacons in Wales seven years ago was another eye-opener in the cultural perception of the bicycle. In the city, there was at least, by then, a growing body of people who acknowledged the health and transport benefits of riding a bicycle. In the countryside, you only rode a bike if you'd lost your driving licence. For a Welsh hill farmer there could be no other reason. Period. The locals watched me pedal in and out of Abergavenny every day, and wondered.

Five months after moving in, I was in the local pub, high up on a hillside, on a Friday night. An old boy I knew only by the name of his farm, cupped my elbow and led me gently to a corner of the bar. He fixed me with a stern gaze: ‘I see yor on the bike,' he said. ‘How long you lost your licence for then, boy?' I explained that I hadn't lost my licence; that I chose to ride a bicycle every day because, well, I just loved it. He winked at me and tapped a gnarled finger on his wind-dried nose. A year later, the farmer again took me aside in the pub, on a Friday night. This time the gaze was even sterner. ‘I see yor on the bike still, boy,' he said. ‘A long time to be banned now, see. You can tell me . . . did you daw something tehr-ribble in a car? Did you kill a child?'

The very best artisan frame-builders have more in common with the craftsmen who make Patek Philippe watches, Monteleone guitars or Borelli shirts than with the mass manufacturers who churn out carbon and aluminium frames from factories in the Far East. Not long ago, much of what we owned was alive with the skill, and even the idealism, of the people who made it — the blacksmith who forged our tools, the cobbler, the wood-turner, the carpenter, the wheelwright, and the seamstress and tailor who made the clothes we wore. We retain possessions that are well made; over time, they grow in value to us, and enrich our lives when we use them. The frame is the soul of the bicycle. The frame of my bike will only be made once, from steel.

The bike will look like a racing bike, but it will be finely tuned to meet my cycling needs. If you like, it will be a ‘riding' bike. I'm not going to race, but I'll ride this bike regularly and I'll ride it fast. I'll ride it round the Brecon Beacons and across Britain. I'll ride ‘centuries' with my friends and cyclosportives. I'll ride it the length of the Pyrenees, over the Col du Galibier, up Mont Ventoux and down the Pacific Coast Highway. When I'm feeling
blue, I'll ride it to work. And when I'm 70, no doubt I'll ride it to the pub.

The components — the handlebar, stem, forks, headset, hubs, rims, spokes, bottom bracket, freewheel, chainwheel, sprockets, chain, derailleurs, cranks, brakes, pedals and saddle — will be chosen to match the frame. They won't be the lightest or the sexiest components on the market. They'll simply be the best made. The wheels will be built by hand. I'll visit workshops and factories in Italy, America, Germany and Britain to see all the components I want on my bike being made. Individually, each component will be something special; collectively, they'll make my dream bike.

The bicycle saves my life every day. If you've ever experienced a moment of awe or freedom on a bicycle; if you've ever taken flight from sadness to the rhythm of two spinning wheels, or felt the resurgence of hope pedalling to the top of a hill with the dew of effort on your forehead; if you've ever wondered, swooping bird-like down a long hill on a bicycle, if the world was standing still; if you have ever, just once, sat on a bicycle with a singing heart and felt like an ordinary human touching the gods, then we share something fundamental. We know it's all about the bike.

The Frame

Handing over a bank note is enough to make a bicycle belong to me,
but my entire life is needed to realize this possession.

(Jean-Paul Sartre)

‘Well, you don't look like a complete bag o' rags,' Brian Rourke said, in his soft Potteries burr. He was standing back, with one hand clamped on his chin and the other upturned on his hip, looking at me astride my bike. Lithe, energetic and refusing to acknowledge his seventy years, he was a good advert for a life spent cycling. ‘Jump off the bike now while I fetch a few things.'

Brian Rourke Cycles occupies a converted squash centre in Stoke-on-Trent. Downstairs is a smart retail bike shop. Upstairs, the old bar has been transformed into Brian's office, where he carries out all the bike fittings. It is a shrine to the sport of road cycle racing. There is a wall of framed bike magazine covers, with riders on Rourke frames leading races; there are photos of Merckx, Gimondi, Kelly and other giants of the sport; iconic Tour de France images; Mario Cipollini's actual 1998 Tour de France bike; a row of silver cups and other pieces of arcane memorabilia. To the right of the door is a merino wool World Champion's jersey worn by Tommy Simpson, the lionhearted anti-hero of British cycling who collapsed and died with drugs
and alcohol in his blood during the Tour de France in raging 113°F heat on 13 July 1967.

On the opposite wall is a photo of Brian beside Nicole Cooke, the outstanding British road cyclist and Olympic champion: ‘She's been coming into the shop since she was 12,' Brian said. ‘Won four world junior championships on Rourke frames. Wonderful girl.' Less prominent is a photo of Brian as a younger man, tilting into a corner, gripping the handlebars, staring ahead, looking hungry, racing hard.

‘Yes, yes, I raced a bit,' he said, bustling back into the room. Actually, he raced a lot. In his prime, he rode for the Great Britain team in three Milk Races and was National Champion. Carlton and Falcon both offered him a professional contract but there was no money in it then. ‘I packed it in, in 1967. Pity, really, but I can't complain.' Racing's loss was the frame-building industry's gain: Brian has been designing and fitting customers to hand-built bicycles almost ever since. In that time, he has never run out of orders for his bespoke bikes. I estimated he must have been through the fitting process some 5,000 times.

Frame-builders from the golden age of British bespoke bicycles in the mid-twentieth century, men like Harry Quinn of Liverpool and Jack Taylor from Stockton-on-Tees, could, I'd been told, size you up as you walked through the door of the workshop. Their experience was such that they needed just one look at you to know the dimensions of the frame you required.

A more reliable fitting or sizing method dating from that time
and still popular now is to take body measurements and interpret them into a frame size. Inside leg (crotch to floor), torso, arm, femur, forearm, shoulder width, shoe-size, height and weight all go into the analysis. In this way, the experience of the person doing the fitting and designing of the frame is, again, crucial.

Today, for both professional athletes and amateur riders with deep pockets, there are various high-tech fitting methods that entail a scientific approach to the biomechanics of cycling. They involve motion capture systems that process data taken from anatomical points on a rider, providing a real-time view of the riding position and pedal action at different workloads. The rider being fitted usually sits on an adjustable jig or ‘size-cycle', a simple frame mounted on a machine that provides traction when you pedal.

Of course, for the majority of people, buying a bicycle involves a ‘fitting process' that is over in under fifteen minutes: the man in the local bike shop sits you on three different bikes, one after the other, takes your credit card while you pedal once round the block; you return and pay. Job done.

Brian's fitting method is different; it's what first drew me to him. There are no more than a handful of frame-builders left in Britain: perhaps a dozen businesses and another dozen hobbyists. On a wet weekend in March, I'd set off to visit as many of them as I could. I criss-crossed the country from Bristol to Bradford via Derby, Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester. In the garage of a suburban semi, I watched Lee Cooper fabricating elegant steel frames for the London fixed-wheel market. Neil Orrell showed me one of his distinctively designed track frames, and photos of a bike he'd once built for a 7-foot man. At Pennine Cycles, Paul Corcoran told me how the shop's founder, Johnny Mapplebeck, had fallen in love with Italian racing bikes when with the Eighth Army during the Allied campaign in Italy. When he was discharged,
he began making frames with names like
Scelta dei Campioni
(‘Choice of Champions') and
Re della corsa
(‘King of the Race'), names that must have sounded exotic in post-war Yorkshire. At Bob Jackson Cycles in Leeds, frames were being boxed to ship to America. I met the ebullient owner, Donald Thomas. He liked his Bob Jackson bicycle so much that he bought the company.

At Mercian Cycles, where three frame-builders work full-time in a workshop that can't have changed in half a century, Grant Mosley told me how the clientele
had
changed: ‘They were all club lads when I started. Following the decline in the 1970s, it was just the diehards — you know, the socks, sandals and beards brigade. Today, it's young professional people.'

It was a delightful journey, fuelled by innumerable mugs of tea. Everywhere I saw pride in workmanship, and a connection to the tradition of British craftsmanship that has set standards worldwide for a century. I would have been happy to have a bike from all of them, but as I was after only
one
bike, I picked Brian Rourke Cycles.

It was easy to justify. Brian was a racer, not only as a young man but also as a ‘veteran'. In fact, he'd won the National Vets Championship aged 40 and again at 50. Racing bikes are in his blood. I wanted a racing bike. Jason, Brian's son and the man who would weld my frame, had a knowledge and passion that was clear. I liked the lads who worked in the shop. I thought not only will I get the most exquisitely built frame, but the process of being fitted, watching it being made and painted, and then having the bike assembled at Rourke Cycles, would be good fun. Above all, Brian's experience fitting people to bicycles and designing frames is unequalled.

Brian likes his customers to bring their current bike into the shop. He then adjusts or ‘sets up' this bike so they are ‘bang on' the right position. Often, customers are sent away to ride the new
set-up, to ensure it's comfortable. When everyone is happy, measurements are taken from the bike, as the guide, and Brian designs the new frame. It's simple and practical. It relies heavily on his experience. ‘Some customers, they just want to give me the dimensions of their existing bike down the phone and have us build a bike. I won't do that. Who's to say they haven't been riding the wrong bike for years? I like to have a good look at everyone first,' he said.