OPINION


The Bike Industry Has Seen Worse — A Veteran’s Perspective on Booms and Busts


By Carlton Reid


Puck magazine of the US, January 1896 from Library of Congress, Wahington DC


Most people think Britain was better 50 years ago,” asserted the headline of a Daily Telegraph piece in mid- November. “UK residents feel that


the environment was cleaner, streets safer and people happier in 1975,” added the article’s sub-head. Were the mid-1970s some golden age of pristine streets and smiling locals? Not according to newspapers and commentators of the time. “What is certain, and felt instinctively by almost


everybody,” editorialised The Times in 1975, “is that things cannot go on in their present way.” Prominent academic Professor Stephen Haseler wrote in the same year: “It is difficult to imagine a previous period when such an all-pervasive hopelessness was exhibited at all levels of British life.” Seventies Britain was troubled by flying pickets, power cuts, and productivity chasms. There was such a general malaise


38 | January 2026


that, in 1974, Foreign Secretary Jim Callaghan (soon to become Prime Minister) had moaned: “If I were a young man, I should emigrate.” Nostalgia, then, is an unreliable emotion.


Unreliable generally and unreliable for the history of bicycle sales, too. Many may think the post-COVID cycle market slump was cataclysmic — and for those who lost long- term jobs or closed their firms, it surely was — but, even in the depths of this awful trough, we were still selling a great deal more bikes per year than in the early 1970s when it might be presumed


by many that Raleigh’s Chopper must have been going gangbusters.


In fact, just 800,000 cycles were sold in the UK in 1973; of all types, banana-saddle bicycles included. In 1969, the British cycle industry had shifted just 572,000 units. (Raleigh introduced the Chopper in 1968.) Cycle sales increased


www.bikebiz.com


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