Saints alive! Brompton Oratory and bad cycle lanes

Cycled past the Brompton Oratory (right) this morning, the splendid Catholic church in West London which somehow gave its name to the folding bike.

There's a statue of the much-venerated figure of Cardinal Newman adorning the church, so why not of the Brompton's much-venerated designer Andrew Ritchie, patron saint* of the ingenious folding personal transport solution, who used to live just opposite in the bike's early days.

According to the church's website, the name 'Brompton Oratory' is incorrect, though that's exactly what the sign outside calls it. They maintain its correct name is the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, but I wouldn't have been so keen on a bike called 'Mary'.

We'd been having an inline skating lesson with Mike van Erp, who's great fun and a brilliant teacher, and being a very active cyclist (whose bike-cam videos of bad drivers appear on YouTube) is obviously the right sort of chap. I only fell over when I laughed. Quite often, then.

We explored the back streets of posh West London on our way home. Down Ebury St (Google map below) is a contraflow cycle lane in a one-way street that's a bit like those cures that are worse than the disease.

The lane (right) forces you to ride right alongside the line of parked cars. One hastily opened door and the best you can hope for is a nice memorial at Brompton Oratory. Unless you ride out a safe distance from the parked cars, in which case you're staring down the barrel of the traffic gunning the other way.

But the lane isn't completely useless: on our visit, it was reassuring to see that the cycle lane did serve a useful purpose, as a taxi park.


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* Of course, the patron saint of the bicycle is in fact the Madonna del Ghisallo. I'll try to remember that next time I have a bike nicked.

Brompton bends the rules (but not on underwear)

The February/March copy of the CTC mag is now out, and has joined the stash of magazines under my bed. (Which are all about bikes, bike touring or cricket. Goodness knows what Freud would make of that.)

Inside it is my article about a trip to the Brompton factory, near Kew Bridge in west London (right top and middle). I talk to Andrew Ritchie, inventor of everyone's favourite folding bike, and to Will Butler-Adams, the energetic new chief exec, about how the company's doing.

OK, seems to be the general answer: they have full order books, a steadily increasing output (22,000 bikes a year and rising), and a nicely mixed portfolio of domestic and export (70 per cent of Bromptons go abroad, I was surprised to learn).

There's something reassuringly old-school about Mr Ritchie (bottom right). He still cycles in to the factory six miles from his house each way, in his pullover and trousers – no lycra nonsense here. He's what my mum would call nicely spoken, with a wry sense of humour and English dispassion. And while the manufacturing process today involves whizzy computer stuff, all those angles and curves on the original Brompton were worked out by the Cambridge engineering graduate on a good old-fashioned slide rule.

Indeed, it's the very slide rule in this picture here. As far as I know, this is the first time the fact has been revealed, or a photo of the item published. (See larger version of photo.) You'll notice there's a slight kink in it, as if in homage the famous graceful bend of the Brompton's main tube. It's not some specially curved instrument for tackling sophisticated hyperbolic functions; Mr Ritchie just left it too close to the fire one day.

Two other features in the mag caught my eye. Following on from yesterday's post, there's an interview with Magnatom, a 'helmet cam vigilante' cyclist in Glasgow who posts up YouTube videos of dangerous drivers, and has received death threats for his activities.

And, in the fascinating diaries of a 1930s cycle tourist travelling light in Yugoslavia and Albania, we learn that 'such luxuries as pyjamas and underwear are soon dispensed with after a little practice'.

I did once travel super-light, with a Brompton and a daypack round Japan. But I definitely did not dispense with underwear.