Explain the UK scene, in your words, your history

i have to say i am really pleased with the response to this thread. :D

alot seems to echo my thoughts on the UK scene, with only a couple of exceptions so far, which seem to centre around whether or not you'd seen MBA mag on the shelves. the bikes we chose to buy and ride back then have similarities of reasons for buying them, which to me is not surprising.

i am now curious as to what the US guys think of these stories of our lack of US influence on what we rode.

do you guys understand (after reading this thread) any better why we ride/restore/vote for the brands/bikes that we do?

does it make any sense to you?


looking for a US views and comments now please :)

-------------------------
edit, see separate thread for US comments as requested, link 2 posts below, thanks :)
 
jonnyboy666":59h6kwo5 said:
i have to say i am really pleased with the response to this thread. :D

alot seems to echo my thoughts on the UK scene, with only a couple of exceptions so far, which seem to centre around whether or not you'd seen MBA mag on the shelves. the bikes we chose to buy and ride back then have similarities of reasons for buying them, which to me is not surprising.

i am now curious as to what the US guys think of these stories of our lack of US influence on what we rode.

do you guys understand (after reading this thread) any better why we ride/restore/vote for the brands/bikes that we do?

does it make any sense to you?


looking for a US views and comments now please :)

Any chace you could start another thread for the comments part. Keep this nice and neat for the stories. I'm enjoying it. Don't much care for the comments :|
Let other people add to it if they wish (yes I know it's your post).
I could buy MBA, bottom of the shelf tucked away in WHSmiths, bought it every now and again for interest and still didn't care for the US bikes, sill don't They're where just bikes built from the same tubes by people who are good at building them who happened to be based in the USA. Mind I didn't much care for what the mags said about ours too much, was influenced of course though I'll have tried to read between the lines, enjoyed the grim time and stuff when I nicked the mags.

Might put my history together if I get a good spell to type :LOL:
 
Have posted this also on the other thread, but for reasons of equality:

This is not intended to spam the thread, just genuine observations.

I know the majority of forum members are UK or USA based, but there seems to a slightly arrogant or may be simply ignorant approach to these threads with regard other countries.

I remember when growing up there was a thriving MTB following in France, and since being on here it's become apparent that this was the case in many other countries.

At the time I didn't really consider this at all.

The greatest surprise to my own ignorance was the apparent popularity in Singapore. With hindsight, this could almost certainly be attributed in a large part to the Shimano plant there, but one only has to spend a little time looking at Jeff's posts with photos of shops exploding with exotica to see there was a thriving import going on too - which presumably means there was a market?

Either that, or the fact the shops are still stocked with Pauls and ProShift indicates there wasn't a market...?!

In any case, whilst I think it's entertaining to hear of UK / USA stories describing the ascendance of different forum members and their experiences, personally I think it would be informative to hear how other countries handled the development - be it 'in house' or through imports.

There were masses of European racers in the worlds very early on, but we rarely hear stories of their 'homeland' so to speak...

As I say, not intending to be confrontational in any way, but Poles, Dutch, German, Italian, Les Francais - we've even got some brazillian members on here! Their insights would make a very interesting read also I think!

Cheers,
BB
 
Back in the faded Kodachrome colours of the late 70s I had a single speed Triumph, bought for me to grow into and by the start of the 80s I had. By now the Triumph had lost its chain and mudguards but it had gained the knobbliest tyres I could find in the bike shop at the top of Shields Road and a set of "cowhorn" bars, wider and higher than usual. This was the ideal machine for ragging roung the woods and abandoned industrial areas of County Durham. There were other bikes available, but Choppers were death traps and Road Racers with gears well out of my range. Someone had a couple of brochures with BMX bikes in but they seemed too small but still aspirational I suppose. And then it came, the mighty Grifter, to my mind, at the time the greatest bike ever, twist gears, big tyres and big enough to mean business. The crushing dissapointment of the first time I road one still leaves me with a bad taste even now. They weighed a ton and just didn't ride anywhere near as good as my old Triumph. Eventually I failed to heed my Fathers warnings about leaving the bike laying round outside the house and he drove over it and that was that. Motorcycles of 250cc became worthless and didn't need peddling and I was converted.
By '88 I'd joined the RAF, out of training and with a few quid in my pocket I fancied another bike. I wandered down to a Bike Shop and discovered the MTB had been invented, apparently in California. A quick blast round the yard on a demo and I was the proud owner of a Diamondback Ascent.
I still am. But I keep it out of my Dads way. ;)
 
janus":2ijlop6l said:
This whole thread is like a yawn on vallium. :?

At least let's have some pics! LOL

in the very first post i ask people to please respect this thread, if someones story is yawn inducing to you then skip it, according to the words under your avatar you are on a learning curve, please learn to be a little more respectful by posting your story so that people can have the chance not to yawn at your story, and by all means add some pictures to tell that story.

thank you

:)

p.s don't take this as me being arsey, you are relatively new here (welcome by the way) and may not be aware of previous reasons for why this thread originally came about.


also, @Boyburning, i have replied on the other thread.
 
dbmtb":dnvr1npk said:
The early 90s in the UK were for many of us a time when we didn't have a huge amount of cash, and we needed to buy kit that would hold up to UK conditions without breaking. Rain didn't stop play in those days. You didn't have a road bike AND an MTB.
Agree with that.

As you say, conditions were damp, if not wet a lot of the time. And for me, a mindsight from the 70s and 80s probably still stuck with me, so I wouldn't have naturally thought about buying a bike for the road, or even buying another set of wheels for a quick switch.

For me, personally, I suspect it wasn't necesarily a money / disposable income thing - I'd say from around 1990 onwards, I started to earn at least reasonable money - I think it was probably as much about the years I'd grown up in, as opposed to what was then the situation.

But then I expect maybe there's a difference between those who'd grown up with bikes through the 70s and 80s, to people who weren't really into bikes, before, but then got interested with the whole mountain biking craze when it hit with all fury.
 
I do think the US scene had a massive impact on me in the early days as it seemed to be so far ahead and what riders were doing over there just seemed way cooler (Kamikaze for instance).

As for the UK scene now it seems to have become heavily fragmented into different camps and fast dissapearing up it's own arse....maybe it's just because it's become 'cool' these days!
 
So ‘Mountain Biking’ or ‘Biking on a mountain’ actually started for me on a BMX circa 1986/87 ish (age 7 !!) We we’re free as kids in the valley to explore and play in the lanes/fields/hills/forests/rivers where i’d cycle up the local Welsh hills, then pelt down the bridleways and foot paths and through the field tracks as fast as possible as if we were famous WRC rally drivers on a bike, it was biking off road. I’d even time my downhill runs on my Casio World Time watch. It was pretending you we a landrover off road when you were too little to be allowed to drive one. Most of us did then start driving in the fields circa age 10, before we had left primary school. I could hit 3rd gear getting the car down from the barn !!

It was also, even back then, about what obstacles we could get over and how steep a hedge/drop we could ride down. (I had no idea it was called trials riding) I use to stand on the rear bmx pegs to get my bum/weight right off the back to do hedge drop offs. This peaked one day with accidentally bouncing almost vertical on the front wheel as the drop ended, I figured that was about the limit. The same applies to riding down ‘milk stand’ steps and hopping over piles of telegraph poles.

The birth of ‘Mountain Biking’ as implied by a few of these threads, to me was a marketing and re branding exercise that happened circa late 1980s early 1990s. Hence the endless debates as to where/when it truly started. To me I’d been doing it years already and someone just decided to rebrand it. So when ever I read the ‘it started here/there’ I just read the marketing started out of there, rather than the actual activity, since we’d all been riding off road for centuries already.

In a sleepy village, that renaming of what we already did came courtesy of MBUK & MTB-Pro in the nearest towns WHSmith newsagents, which was our only source of anything that commented on what we were doing. It was probably from there that the name of my chosen hobby switched from ‘Biking’ to ‘Mountain Biking’, since it sounded cooler, more extreme or niche and more accurately described the type of biking we enjoyed doing the most.

We had never called it BMXing as we assumed you needed a bmx track to call it that and we only had 1 slide and 2 tyre swings in our village, never mind a bmx track.

My BMX was perfectly suited to off-roading with wider tyres, good mud clearance, padded top tubes. My first memory that most might stereotype as a ‘mountain bike’ was probably a Raleigh Lizzard or the equivalents just before that in the late 80s. The attraction of them though was 5 speed or 10 speed gears. I recall kids in primary boasting about who had the most gears. I don’t remember us calling these mountain bikes much though, that only really happened as tyre sizes grew to match the terrain better. And I think the change in tyre widths really defines the moment mountain biking itself was born as we know it. Whoever can claim the creation and use of tyres dedicated to off-road mud can claim the mountain bike creation I feel, rather than tweakes in geometry which still happen to this day. Once you had a wide nobbly tyre, irrespective of frame or gear numbers or mechanicals, it was clearly a bike for off roading over mountains.

My first memory/experience then of a proper mountain bike would be my older brothers when he bought it home from Uni circa 1992, a silver & blue Halfords sold Peugeot Tim Gould edition, with basic front suspension. We made dirt jumps for this and everything.

It was a few years later till the parentals justified me having my own proper mtb rather than the sibling hand me down bikes. I opted for the Saracen Terratrax 1994/95 as the best I could find and afford in the region. As couldn’t find or afford an red M2 😒

Once acquired and the surrounding 10miles conquered, I joined a local towns bike club in the mid 90s and off to WRC forests we would drive on club rides and a few regional races in the Welsh dragon series. The best bikes in that club, a Cannodale Delta-V, an Orange P7 and a few gold Judy forks and that was about it.

The rest is modern history…
 
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