Submitted by: Submitted by joaneb
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Words: 1121
Pages: 5
Category: Business and Industry
Date Submitted: 01/09/2013 03:58 AM
Made in britain
The Brompton has been
the benchmark folding
bike for two decades
– and it’s still made in
London, with full order
books. Rob Ainsley
visited the factory to find
out the secret
Making
the
folding
stuff
T
he Brompton factory is nicely located for
anyone with a folder: two minutes’ scoot from
Kew Bridge station in west London, on a small
industrial estate walled in by the M4. Here they
hand-make 22,000 collapsible bikes a year.
Outside the entrance, by the ‘Visitors Welcome’ sign,
you notice something curious among the ornamental
saplings. Perched atop each of half-a-dozen slender metal
rods, perhaps eight feet high, is a Brompton part: crankset,
handlebars, frame tube with that distinctive curve, and so
on, like a robot’s sunflowers.
You smile, but it tells you two important things. First,
they make their own parts here (over three-quarters
of the components on a Brompton are unique). And
second, they put technique on a pedestal. Because
they’re engineers: what they love is making bits. Clever
bits, that do useful stuff.
How success unfolded
It’s the Brompton’s flippy-under back wheel that makes
it unique, snuggling beneath the body of the bike like the
paws of a fireside cat. But it’s one thing to have a back-of-anenvelope idea (as the bike’s creator, Cambridge engineering
graduate Andrew Ritchie, did in 1975). Making it work is
another. Making it pay is another still. Ritchie approached
bike manufacturers with prototypes but they weren’t
interested. Eventually, after raising money from friends and
making a few himself, production started in 1987.
Steadily the business grew. Two short-distance moves
later, Brompton – which somehow acquired its name from
Brompton Oratory, opposite Ritchie’s home – is here in
Chiswick Park. There are 95 staff, 70 of them on the footballpitch-sized shop floor. Much of it looks like any other
factory: islands of men engrossed in welding, or working jigs
and lathes;...