Coventry’s bike pioneers

In your interesting piece on the Raleigh story (April), Steve Humphries writes that the story of British cycling’s rise to global domination began with the adventures of the company’s founder, Frank Bowden. Surely not. It was in Coventry in 1871 that James Starley (pictured left) designed the Ariel, still regarded by many as the first true bicycle, and it was in Coventry that, in the mid-1880s, his nephew, John Kemp Starley, brought to market his Rover safety cycle, the ancestor of all modern bicycles. Between them, James, still regarded as the father of the British cycle industry, and JK made Coventry the bicycle manufacturing centre of the world at the

beginning of the 1890s, long before Raleigh’s years of dominance. Peter Walters, Coventry