Brompton Build

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;...