The next generation of wheels are lighter, faster, foldable and available to hire. Get on your bike, says

Trends Jimi Famurewa

EVERY type of bike comes with its own distinct bit of cultural baggage. Fixies, of course, still imply an owner with a fondness for geometric wrist tattoos and a career at a small-batch sake distillery. A top-end carbon fibre road bike suggests you obsessively glare at cycling social network Strava and chug energy gels at traffic lights.

And then there’s the folding bike: as sure a sign as any that you belong to the tribe of trouser-clipped creatives wheeling their customisable steeds off a rush hour train.

Until recently the purest way to gain entry to this cult has been to fork out for one of Brompton’s beloved t wowheelers. No longer. From foldable hire schemes and sleekly designed new brands to collapsible e-bikes and

‘The brightest minds in technology are devoting themselves to smart ways of reinventing the wheel’

eccentric crowdfunded innovations, change is afoot.

The brightest minds in technology are devoting themselves to more lightweight materials and smart ways to get you around — reinventing the wheel, if you will. When it comes to folders, there have never been more ways to get on board.

And, in truth, not all of these portable rides actually “fold” in the traditional sense. Take Whippet, designer and cycling obsessive Graham Powell’s new entry into a market where sector leader Brompton plans to sell 100,000 bikes a year by 2022.

“My whole thing has always been challenging tradition and convention in design,” says Powell. “So I thought: ‘It’s a folding bike but does it have to fold?’” This cognitive breakthrough ultimately led to the Whippet (whippetbicycle. com), a beautifully minimal compact bike that uses “in-line” retraction rather than traditional folding. “It’s taller and slimmer, rather than shorter and fatter,” says Powell, nodding to the bike’s 190mm stowed width and Albert, the pet whippet/company mascot who gave it its name.

Powell, who studied at the Royal College of Art, has designed the Whippet with space-strapped Londoners in mind. “A lot of people buy them after they’ve had their normal bike stolen,” he says. “And we’ve all had that thing of having to squeeze past a bike in the hallway, dropping your shopping. This answers those questions quite well.”

As well as a neat stowaway mechanism, which reduces into a rollable frame that’s 30 per cent of its normal volume, the Whippet aims to improve on the ride quality offered by other folders. The wheels are 20in rather than Brompton’s dinky 16in and flexible oval-shaped tubes soak up bumps in the road without the need for suspension or dampeners.

“A Brompton is an amazing folder but most people don’t ride it for more than 10 miles,” says Powell. “I’ve got quite a few bicycles — mountain bikes, racers, everything — and I can ride the Whippet over 40 or 50 miles just as well as I can a racer.”

Having won over the Brompton and Moulton heads at this year’s Bespoked festival in Bristol, Powell is gearing up for production and hoping to take preorders later this year. He envisions the top-of-the-range model will cost around £3,000 and ship early next year.

If you’re after something that’s less of a sizeable investment the Brompton Bike