The skeleton of a Brompton bike has six components: the rear frame connects to the main frame; the main frame connects to the front frame; and the fork, handlebar pin and stem all connect to the front frame. Dem bones, dem bones, dem bones… 

But it’s the joints, not the bones, that make this skeleton dance. Four of them – folds and slides in a machine that, for almost 150 years since the first sit-up-and-beg bicycle designs of 1880s, has prided itself on relentless rigidity. Bikes aren’t meant to bend. Yet Bromptons do. And more than ever it is us they are shaping. Over the pandemic demand soared, with the company doubling down on production. Its current turnover is close to £100 million and Brompton is now planning an ambitious new eco-friendly site to expand even further. 

Release the clip that connects that rear frame and fold the back wheel under the main crossbar; unscrew the mainframe hinge and swivel the front wheel back; lift the lever to drop the seat post; then unscrew the angled second hinge so the handlebars fall flush against the rest. These are the mechanics of a quirkily British success story. 

For novices it can seem a bewildering exercise in public humiliation. But more experienced hands can collapse a Brompton in about 20 seconds and true experts, as documented in countless YouTube videos, manage it in under six, transforming a 147cm-long strand of metal and rubber into a cube 58cm long and 27cm deep, convenient enough to be hauled on to the Tube, into the office, or even, says Will Butler-Adams, 47, the company’s plummy-voiced CEO, into ‘pubs and nightclubs’. 

‘I love going to nightclubs,’ he says, gazing out over the factory floor in Greenford, west London, where about 650 bikes are made each day, four days a week. It’s a production line he is constantly trying to improve. But his attention, for once, isn’t there. He’s really gazing back 20 years, to the time when he’d just joined Brompton, and was exploring London, dancing, drinking, and meeting his future wife, Sarah, known as Bugs, with whom he lives near Henley with their three teenage daughters. ‘There would always be someone at the [nightclub] cloakroom with amazing nails, and I’d rock up with my bike and they’d never refuse it, and when we’d leave at two in the morning Bugs would stand on the back. I was having a blast.’ 

Reminiscence is essential to the Brompton story. It’s important to remember that, those same two decades ago, it was a company with 27 staff and £2 million turnover on the production of 6,000 bikes a year. Today there are more than 600 employees making well over 100,000 bikes a year, in four pedal-powered variations on the basic theme, from the basic ‘A-line’ which starts at £850 and weighs 11.5kg, to the premium, titanium ‘T-line’ which shaves off four kilos but adds three grand to the bill. There’s also an electric version for £2,995. 

It is a transformation that has not been without its casualties – the eccentric genius behind the original design has been sidelined. Nor is it over yet. Butler-Adams has plans to capitalise on new-found, Covid-inspired enthusiasm for cycling, not just in Britain but around the world; to help transform motor cities from London to LA to Beijing. A new factory is in the works for an ‘innovative new product’, whose design will harness advances in ‘materials science, robotics, the internet of things’. Will it even have a hinge? He shrugs. ‘There are no sacred cows. We’re not about the bike. The bike’s irrelevant. It’s about doing our best to make people a little bit happier… in urban living.’ So can Brompton, a quintessentially barmy British brand, conquer the globe and retain its soul? 

Andrew Ritchie, the Cambridge-educated engineer who designed the first Brompton in the mid-’70s, would probably say in growing so far so fast, it has already lost it. ‘I got a 17-page letter [from Ritchie] in 2012,’ says Butler-Adams, fondly. ‘Seventeen pages, line-by-line, showing how I had ruined the company. I adore him. But you know, over the years he’s driven me potty and I can with absolute confidence say that he would say the same about me.’