Cycling UK Forum

Chatting today about the demise of the British Manufacturing Industry.
(Actually, I was round at the South Devon Railway workshops. )

The point was:
"We in Britain can't even make a bicycle any more!"

Is this true?

There are frame builders over here, and tube mills so on some scale we do. You may have a hard time finding British owned and made hardware tho. We make very little now and the things we do make are from companies owned by some one overseas. Thanks Maggy!

I suppose the nearest we get is Moulton and Pashley. They must be at least 50 percent British, by weight?

Caveat: Pashley don't count - who'd put pressed mild steel bolt-on seat stays on something and call it a bike

mrbarry wrote:Thanks Maggy!

Blair too!!

There are quite a few frame "builders" but they will be using tubes made abroad. (Reynolds - Columbus - Fuji)
We do manufacture allsorts but nothing on the scale we did.
British steel is now owned by an Indian company. There is a firm in Scotland who still make iron castings for ornate railings etc.
We still manufacture some cars (Nissan Honda Fords Vauxehall Jaguar but none owned by Britain.)
We are one of the best in world in the racing car industry F1 and Indy cars.
We have a very nice weapons industry - submarines - fighter bombers - tanks.
We are in partnership with some EU countries in designing and building passenger aircraft.
We have some of the top engineers / designers in the world.
We still are an innovative nation, we just don't seem to be able to make the most out of it.

Tanks.
That was another subject we were talking about. We may design them and assemble them, but we don't make them.

The thing is, getting back to bicycles, yes, we can make frames, but what about the groupset components?

Back in the Good Old Days, we made everything. Everything from the tyres, handle grips and bells, to the 3sp SA hubs, the spokes, rims, saddle, and even the chain!

Who makes chains nowadays?
Even my precious Campagnolo chains aren't made in Italy any more.

it's not the manufacturers that can't manufacter, it's the investers and capatalists that fluff it all up. for example, raleigh, sturmey archer and rover all had reasonable enough companies, but with low investment. however, if you were an invester with capital to put somewhere safe with a good return, would you have touched any of those, when there's the likes of shell & BP, commercial property, arms suppliers, any number of things that would perform better. of course, many of you are those very investers through your pension funds, but you want the best return, not british jobs. then there's the owners of the company. let's look at raleigh in nottingham. would you like to pay UK staff rates, UK insurance, UK electricity, UK business rates & etc. i'll bet for a big factory, it's at least £50/ph of labour done. you can get the taiwanese to do it for a lot less, and sell off acres and acres of land in nottingham at £1/2m+ per acre. what would you do if you were the owner (and for many of the businesses that have gone the same way, we are the owners through our modest investments), retire as a multi-millionaire, or keep turning up to work, seeking out investors for new product development??

the answer, obviously, is to put the means of production into the workers control...marxism, but that's not very likely to happpen. better still is to be born on the right side of the tracks, so to speak (as all us western europeans have been), and just keep on creaming off your investements, whilst letting the little orientals produce your ever increasing demands of material goods. you could even blame them for ever increasing carbon emmissions that they produce building stuff for us that we don't need. maybe soon, they'll be on £25000 pa each too, and then the africans will be doing the assembling and polluting. . what happens after that i don't know, but i doubt it'll be the utopia that science fiction promised of a 5hr. week with everything automated and plenty for all, by the year 2000

i haven't even touched on the issues of finite resources, but whatever happens, we'll all be in our graves before the africans get a standard of living comparable to ours.

Mick F wrote:The point was:
"We in Britain can't even make a bicycle any more!"

Is this true?

Brompton? World class bike with many or most of the bits made in the factory here too.

A common urban myth, exploded by simple Googling

We are still the 6th or 7th largest manufacturing nation, ahead of France, Korea, Spain and India (2007 figures)

Might have slipped recently due to Sterling devaluation but that has mixed blessings.

World class pharma, biotech, electronics (not just defence, ever heard of ARM?) - the list goes on (DYOR)

We may not make nuts, bolts and tubes any more - so what?

philg wrote:A common urban myth, exploded by simple Googling

We are still the 6th or 7th largest manufacturing nation, ahead of France, Korea, Spain and India (2007 figures)

Might have slipped recently due to Sterling devaluation but that has mixed blessings.

World class pharma, biotech, electronics (not just defence, ever heard of ARM?) - the list goes on (DYOR)

We may not make nuts, bolts and tubes any more - so what?

I don't think ARM are a good example, they don't actually make processors, they licence the technology to whoever wants to make them. We do still have some good brains in the country, I'd agree. But if we have more factory output than India, I'd say it was a miracle. We can't touch India for sheer volume of manufactured output. And I'm not talking about British "manufacturers" that outsource the actual making to other countries.

Personally, I blame the arrogance and short-sightedness of the British workforce, most of whom throughout the 70s couldn't see beyond their own noses. "The whole world owes us a living" attitude killed off any last chance we had of remaining a manufacturing base of any importance.

I'm not being clear about MAKING a bicycle.

In the old days, steel was pushed in one end of the factory, and a bicycle came out the other end.

Brompton do indeed make bikes.
Who makes the tyres?
Who makes the chain?
Who makes the cranks?
etc
etc
etc

In the old days, Raleigh (for instance) made the lot!

We may be a Manufacturing Nation, but we're more like an Assembling Nation.

GrahamNR17 wrote:I suppose the nearest we get is Moulton and Pashley. They must be at least 50 percent British, by weight?

Caveat: Pashley don't count - who'd put pressed mild steel bolt-on seat stays on something and call it a bike

You can't do full chainguards without bold on seat stays!

fatboy wrote:

GrahamNR17 wrote:
You can't do full chainguards without bold on seat stays!

Really? Raleigh managed to do so for a hundred years. And Hercules. And... etc

Mick F wrote:I'm not being clear about MAKING a bicycle.

In the old days, steel was pushed in one end of the factory, and a bicycle came out the other end.

Brompton do indeed make bikes.
Who makes the tyres?
Who makes the chain?
Who makes the cranks?
etc
etc
etc

In the old days, Raleigh (for instance) made the lot!

We may be a Manufacturing Nation, but we're more like an Assembling Nation.

You're absolutely right, Mike. It's sad, but that's globalisation for you

.