Anyone who has had the misfortune to be in central London at rush hour will be familiar with an unlovely spectacle: that of a middle-aged man solemnly making a fool out of himself on an ungainly-looking bicycle that seems slightly too small for him. This mode of transportation is none other than the Brompton bicycle, once a status symbol for any upwardly mobile professional but now, increasingly and unsurprisingly, regarded as an object of ridicule. The recent news that the company’s sales are declining, for the third year in a row, will come as a surprise to few; it is more of a shock to realise that this strange, overpriced contraption has lasted for fifty years.
Cycling has always been a Marmite pursuit: for everyone who swears by it, there is someone else who swears at its practitioners
If the absolute apotheosis of the Brompton bicycle user was Hugh Bonneville’s well-meaning but hapless character Ian Fletcher in the BBC comedy W1A, trying and forever failing to fold up his infernal machine, then it did not necessarily do the brand a disservice to be associated with a certain kind of type. Ever since it was invented in South Kensington in 1975 by Andrew Ritchie – the name refers to the Old Brompton Road which ran near the flat in which the bicycle’s notoriously fiddly folding mechanism was devised – it has been a shorthand for earnest liberal metropolitan do-gooders, who really care about values and the environment and darting around town on their undersized vehicles.
Cycling has always been a Marmite pursuit – for everyone who swears by it, there is someone else who swears at its practitioners – but the Brompton bicycle presented itself as the middle-class alternative to Lycra-clad torment. At the company’s peak, it could rely on free advertising from the starry likes of Gemma Arterton and Owen Wilson, who were photographed riding their products; and when lockdown and pandemic woes made it fashionable, even commendable, to avoid public transport in favour of the good old-fashioned bike, Brompton was swift to capitalise.
Its products have never been cheap: you can expect to pay between £1,400 and £2,500 for one of its bicycles. But the opportunity for you, too, to virtue signal your way through the traffic before grappling with the mercurial folding mechanism was once surprisingly seductive.
Now, however, the company seems to be in a period of existential decline. With many turning to the easier, cheaper Lime bikes to get them around town, the Brompton bicycle is beginning to seem like an anachronism. Not even a recent collaboration with professional adventurer Bear Grylls could bring the company the kudos that it so desperately longed for. In the last business year, a comparatively trifling 78,530 bikes were sold: not bad if this was a purely niche concern, but a small number for a brand that once seemed to encapsulate a certain kind of cheery, mustn’t-grumble Britishness. It would have come as little surprise to find Bonneville’s Paddington character Mr Brown riding one – or, for that matter, Paddington himself. Although no doubt folding it up would have meant that the loveable Peruvian bear would have got into some hilarious scrape or other.
Criticising Brompton bikes, then, is to criticise a whole way of life that has little, if anything, to do with the product itself. It is to criticise a particular spirit of good-natured striving and self-deprecating silliness: a tacit admission that, yes, the bike looks a bit ridiculous and, yes dismantling it can be a pain, but it’s all for a good cause and the end justifies the means. Once, this might have worked, but now, as people become increasingly weary of the fin de siècle of twee, it is inevitable that the Brompton bicycle may have met its Waterloo. Ian Fletcher may mourn its demise, but it is doubtful that too many others will.
