Brooks England opened the doors of their Birmingham workshop to host the first Open Factory in over a century. Our European correspondent, and gonzo journo, Petor Georgallou, seized the opportunity to explore their archive of historic designs dating back more than 150 years. Join us for a rare look behind the scenes at one of the longest-running brands in cycling. Enjoy the show…
Having already visited the Brooks factory only three years ago, I was a little reluctant to go back and visit again, because celebrating a business for remaining unchanged for decades is kind of a one-time thing. So, driving up the M1 past the sign that shouts THE NORTH (although Smethwick is actually in the Midlands; I’m a Southerner, so north of Watford is THE NORTH), I had in my mind a very different article: one borne of Brooks’s early and prolific history of saddle, luggage, and accessory design for both bicycles and motorcycles.
Visiting the factory on a workday is a very different experience from an open house, where everything has been pulled out of the drawers and put on display. I was excited to look through the physical archives of designs and patents, flipping through aging leather-bound volumes, some dating back 150 years.
Even though nothing had physically changed in the factory for decades, the trip was still hugely valuable and genuinely inspiring. The mood was completely different, and – unlike basically everything else in the world – it felt lighter, more creative, and more hopeful.
I continued my perfect streak of never arriving on time or even being in time by showing up a day earlier than the industry day, which preceded the actual open factory day, and hanging around like a bad smell while the Italians set up for a party. I spent the day rummaging through drawers, pulling things out of cupboards, and generally being nosy around the factory, totally unimpeded.
The Italians
The Italians refers to the predominantly Italian crew steering the ship at Brooks since the business was bought by Selle Royal back in 2002. They had organized the Open Factory event and flown over for the party. Plenty of prep had taken place before I arrived, but there were still things to be done before the guests showed up – tasks being handled in a wonderfully relaxed and expressly un-English manner.
Aside from being on an industrial estate skirting Birmingham, the place felt like a shabby Tuscan villa on a hillside being set-dressed for a party – which I joked about (more than was probably funny) to Jacopo, Brooks’ brand manager. I told him I hoped the party would be like the opening scene of Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 film La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty). Jacopo replied, “I don’t like Sorrentino. He’s a scene director playing at making feature films. He makes great clips, but the films are bad.”
I’d never thought of it that way, because most films in modernity are somewhat bad, but they also don’t have any good scenes. So, I’m a fan of Sorrentino for a gaggle of great clips spread through a growing number of feature films. Jacopo eloquently ruined Sorrentino for me in a sentence, and I think he knew I was a little sad, because a minute later he added, “But that scene is exactly how parties in Rome really are. That could be like a party in Rome.”
A spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.
There’s an epidemic of misery in England – and worse, there’s a joy taken, or perhaps a sense of validity felt, in reveling in that misery. A dull ache toward apathy, or the tacit acceptance that nothing is good and nothing will be good – but it’s fine, because things could be worse. That phrase is pure treachery. It’s a defeatist assassin of hope dressed in optimism’s clothing, when real optimism is angry and vibrant and says, It should be better.
There’s a tendency toward this it could be worse attitude in old manufacturing businesses in the UK (in my experience, it’s especially rife in powdercoating and fabrication). It’s the kind of attitude that can drive a wedge between us and them,” where “us” and “them” are the office and the floor of the same factory.
This is not the case at Brooks.
Joergen, Brooks’ new marketing guy – who I’d classify for the sake of relational understanding as Italian, although he’s only recently joined the team at Selle Royal in Italy and is actually from Michigan via the Netherlands – led me through the parts of the factory that had been dressed for the occasion. I dumped my bag in an office being used as an archive room for the event, where he sat me down and listed all the things happening behind the scenes to make this relatively unchanged saddle manufacturer better moving forward.
It was amazing: real, tangible, and quantifiable. A genuine push to make good products better going forward, building on the company’s cultural equity and goodwill, rather than strip-mining it for every last penny or testing what “the market can bear.” Long-term positive changes, built on the shoulders of what’s already there.
It felt like progress – optimism and technological innovation (which is a very strange thing to say about the Brooks leather saddle factory) – rather than marketing or marketeering. That really summed up the mood.
During my last visit three years ago, Brooks hadn’t felt like an it could be worse kind of place, but this time, there was definitely a renewed sense of purpose, focus, or simply forward-facing optimism in the factory that I hadn’t felt before. I don’t know if everyone was just really excited about the event, or if it was the new brand team supergroup, the reinvestment in the old factory, or the new tour de force operations manager, Martin (formerly of Reynolds) (not Italian), blowing fresh wind through the machines.
Whatever it was, there had been a status change since my last visit – and the positivity around that shift was palpable.
The Archives
I don’t know what I expected from a Brooks “archive.” There’s a fairly well-documented history of saddles and luggage design from a time before bicycles were old or normal. One hundred fifty years ago, Brooks was cutting edge and focused on optimizing the future of bicycles and motorcycles. Sprung leather saddles were a comfortable, lightweight alternative to wooden saddles, which were being used at the time. But to an extent, bicycles were new, so there was no normal. Any weird idea was fair game and received without judgment, so the culture of innovation in industrial Britain was very different.
I’ve seen sales books and pamphlets, both digitally and physically, of hundreds of contraptions and methods the zealous and prolific John Boultbee Brooks tried up to the Second World War, when the original factory was commandeered by the government for manufacturing war materials. During WWII, it was partially destroyed by bombing. It was rebuilt but then burned to the ground in 1946. After that, the current factory was built with all new machines.
By that time, the form of bicycles had kind of settled into something close to modern bikes. Normality and austerity were both forces for creativity and innovation to contend with. The business was bought by Raleigh in the 1960s – this is, I guess, when the archive stopped being an archive.
I had kind of expected a room full of mahogany-framed glass cabinets, like a museum, with all the weird gun racks and tennis racket holders and saddle suspension designs that had proliferated in the original factory. From that imagined room, I wanted to tell the story of how bicycles went from ubiquitous and utilitarian to specialized and fringe forms of transport – without the needs of their users ever really having changed. How innovation and progress in transport design gave way to built-in redundancy and the marketing of sports equipment rather than transport by bike.
It seems as though the majority of the early work of the Brooks family and company was lost in the fire, and what’s left – mostly things from the ’60s onward – was never filed or stored properly. There are plan chests filled with hand-drawn designs for all sorts of things: from the factory’s purpose-built machines, to saddles, furniture, buildings, and one thing that looks suspiciously like the Death Star.
There is one little glass display case with velvet lining and a mirror that houses a number of the embossing stamps Brooks has used over the years. But underneath that, there are boxes more, with stamps ranging from saddle models and companies that were bought out and absorbed by Brooks, to companies like Jeep or Dunhill – which Brooks must have made something for in the past, but no one knows what or when. I left with a one-of-one Dunhill cigarette-branded B17 Special on my brother Mr. Wooden.
I guess the point is that although there’s always been a commitment to making high-quality saddles – in a way that would now be tricky, insanely expensive, and redundant to repeat anywhere else in the world – there hasn’t been a sense of preciousness at Brooks about recording every product they’ve worked on.
I’ve seen a fair few custom Brooks saddles, editions, imitators, and collaborators as I stare down the barrel of 20 years in the cycling industry, but I didn’t know Brooks did a collab with Stussy, or the Cycle Courier World Championships all over the world, or Dunhill cigarettes, or that they’ve been made all over Europe at various points, as well as in Africa and India. Even with the sparse presentation of disparate sections of a 150-year history, I feel like I learned a lot – with the rare and treasured freedom I was granted to roam around pulling things out of cupboards, asking, “What’s this?”
The First Open Factory in Over a Century
While the occasional journalist has been allowed to visit, never before in their long and illustrious history has Brooks held an open house event. It all came together seamlessly, with help from veteran events organizer Stef Amato. The industry day brought together a disparate gaggle of photographers, journalists, bloggers, and bike people, as well as a handful of exhibitors who brought bikes. It felt comfortable, like a reunion with old colleagues.
After the morning’s tour, most people were sent home to sleep off the afternoon’s pasta feast held in the loading bay. I stayed behind with the stragglers and the Brooks team to shoot a few bikes and drink a lot of coffee. While I was out in the car park-turned-Sicilian courtyard shooting bikes, the Brooks team was inside the factory arranging bouquets of wildflowers and hanging festoons around a space they’d cleared for dinner in the middle of the factory floor.
Far from the raucous, extravagant Roman party in The Great Beauty, it was a tasteful and intimate gathering of Brooks’ brand and development teams, local management, and factory staff, with generous helpings of traditional Birmingham curry. It was a quiet, almost humble celebration of the current stewards of the iconic British saddle brand, and I felt incredibly privileged to be invited.
The next morning, the gates opened to the general public, with an open invitation to tour the factory. Factory staff welcomed everyone, from enthusiasts and industry folks to saddle owners, friends and families of workers, and employees from other nearby factories. Tours ran all day, with the festoons and flower arrangements still adorning the space. In the afternoon, a fish and chip trailer arrived.
Now, I’m a massive fish and chips snob, and any deviation from fresh (not frozen) fish and potatoes fried in beef dripping is, to me, a travesty. However, the novel twist – giving fish and chips a true Birmingham spin with fish pakora and masala chips (with curry sauce, obviously) – was banging.
The public day was a true highlight. Not only did it give people the chance to see how things are made – which always blows the minds of those unfamiliar with manufacturing – but it also gave factory staff the rare experience of seeing just how much their work means to others. Many of the staff ride, mostly casually, some commuting to work, but for the most part, they’re local factory workers making something in a local factory. It was amazing to witness the wave of positivity and appreciation for a niche, nearly unchanged product – made to an incredibly high standard – that almost no one else is producing anywhere in the world.
It was a real joy to see the entire Brooks team in the same place, at the same time, all pulling in the same direction to improve something they’ve been making for over 150 years. I felt honored to be part of what was outwardly an open house, but in truth was a fun and intimate celebration of the impact Brooks has had on cycling culture in the UK over the past century and a half. More than that, it was a celebration of the people keeping the Brooks brand relevant – and the lights on – for the next century.
The Radavist would like to thank Brooks England for supporting this Independent Reportage!