Bicycles are a feeling
A few months back, Rosie from Bespoked got in touch to ask me to write an article for the Bespoked 2025 show guide. There wasn’t a theme or set topic, it could be whatever I wanted. I had about all these different ideas: localism in bike design, the state of frame building, the why of frame building, things like that. After a few false starts, I decided to just write this.
I don’t really believe there’s feelings better than the two wheeled glide, the freewheel with your eyes closed, the slow drop of your insides when you dip a shoulder turning down a smooth corner.
Than silently pedalling into the hills with a picnic and no time to worry about.
Nothing better than that knot of excitement at carrying everything you need right there on your bike, having your food, water, shelter and transport, any place to go.
Or that sense of being wrapped in green spinning up some sunken Devon lane, a chlorophyll blanket humid on your back and insects in your hair, blackberry stained fingers.
Or slipping smiling through congested streets like you’ve got a secret key to the city.
Or else covered in dust or mud or grit in some anonymous conifer plantation turned into a sanctuary, a theme park, a cathedral.
It was always bicycles for me, from primary school, that gave me the feelings and experiences I treasure the most. I think of the bicycle as this elemental creation, more akin to fire, or the breeze, or thunder, than to the industrial product that I know it really is. I’m a frame builder: I can think of bicycles as technical objects, all trigonometry and metallurgy. I can sink into the often tedious morass of detail on componentry or tubing butts as well as the next person, but I’m not sure that really gets to the point for me.
I started to build bicycles because of what I think of as the rabbit hole you can fall down to Wonderland. I wanted to load things on my bike, so as I could vanish into the country to drink tea on dark hillsides. And carry the food shop home. Looking into bicycle load carrying led to bending racks to fit my annoying bikes. Finding old porteur racks in the depths of my bike co-op fell into more reading about geometry, led to old framebuilders. That dropped towards getting oxy-acetylene tanks with a friend, to bending tubes and tentatively, awkwardly, piecing together racks, not noticing that all this time I was tumbling down the rabbit hole. At some point I looked up and realised what had happened; that I wasn’t a mechanic anymore, I was a builder, scraping around the swarf in Wonderland. I only build frames now because I wanted to build racks, because I wanted to carry stuff, because I wanted to live a life on a bicycle. It was all just so much grist for the mill, and even from down here in Wonderland, you can see that. In the words of Kimya Dawson: I’ve never met a bike that I didn’t want to ride.
Bicycles near enough came out fully formed, taking less than a hundred years to go from running machine to archetype, and so much of what folk worry about is but tinkering at the edges. Yes, maybe a degree on the head tube matters, and agonising over a .7-.5-.7 versus a .9-.6-.9 top tube can seem important in the middle of it all. But actually, what I really care about, what I always really cared about, was where that joy machine could take us. A bicycle can be nicer or uglier, it can be better or worse in a myriad of ways both fundamental and peripheral. But if it can carry you and your stuff over the hills and far away (or to the greengrocers) then it’s a joy machine, make no mistake. Now, many bikes these days won’t even cross that simple threshold, picnics sacrificed at the alter of aerodynamics, racks too gauche and mudguards too pedestrian, and that’s why I do what I do.
I start with what luggage folk want to carry, how they want to carry it, where they want to roll to. Racks are the heart of the whole thing to me, that affect, more than anything else, the feel of the bike, the utility of the thing, the potential of it to change your life. I’ve made bikes for parents to carry their children, a shepherd to carry his dogs, an adventurer to carry his woodburning stove. I’ve made bikes for an artist to carry her work around Japan, a woodworker her tools, a buddhist her dreams.
The alchemy of framebuilding is hidden in there. I don’t really think the brazing – I obsess about it! – is important. The angles – I sweat over my CAD! – don’t mean so much after all. The coherence of my aesthetics – I agonise over tiny braze ons! – is irrelevant.
In the end, I just want to make bicycles that offer up their gifts: the feeling of the glide and of freedom, flying into blue and disappearing into green.