Last night I had the pleasure of attending the launch party for Robert Penn’s impassioned new book It’s All About the Bike at Rapha Cycle Club. It was a fantastic evening, with the Penguin staff arriving en masse on their bikes, a warm welcome from his editor Helen Conford and a hilarious speech from Robert Penn full of great anecdotes and romantic memories of writing the book; touring the world to design and build his dream bike.
Living in London for a year, meeting an author like Robert Penn 6 months prior to publication of his book, and having an old rusty road bike that was much in need of a service convinced me of one thing: it was time to do up my bike.
I should probably make it very clear from the start that I sit firmly in the single-speed camp when it comes to cycling in London. I gave it a 2 week trial, and having not once changed gear throughout the course of my various cycling expeditions, I decided single-speed was the way to go.
Having just read the manuscript for Robert Penn’s It’s All About the Bike and living with a housemate who had become strangely obsessed with doing his own bike up [reading such blogs as: http://www.sheldonbrown.com/] the enthusiasm was infectious and it wasn’t long until I was eyeing up various styles and colours cycling past me as I sat glumly on the bus or stepped out of a stuffy tube station.
Now not knowing very much about bikes, and believing in fashion before function, I knew my main interest was going to be in the aesthetics of the bike. I could give you arguments about the lighter weight of the frame with losing the gear cogs, streamlining with losing the wires and back brakes, the greater chain-tension allowing you to pull off faster from numerous traffic lights… but the reality is I simply wanted to strip my bike down, keep the lines clean and be the envy of various Shoreditch-types.
Fortunately, I had a strong Dawes steel frame as a starting point and felt that although I would miss the purple and turquoise colour scheme and the old-and-rusty-but-still-pretty-cool statement it was making; it was time to freshen it up, clean off the rust and give it a new lease of life.
So with the help of my housemate I began stripping my bike down, getting rid of all the excess baggage and opting for the bear minimum: one front brake (just lean back) and a single speed gear cog. We found a good and cheap place to get the frames sandblasted and powder-coated from this bike blog: