Come on, prime minister: a peerage for our peerless folding bike designer

Asked to name Britain’s greatest living industrial designer, most people might cite Sir Jony Ive of Apple or Sir James Dyson of the bagless vacuum cleaner. I’d certainly shortlist Ive, but I traded in my unreliable Dyson for a brutally efficient German machine called a Sebo and I’ve always thought Sir James was overhyped. I might also mention Dumfries-born Ian Callum, the director of design for Jaguar cars responsible for the sleek F-Type. But surely the top prize must go to Andrew Ritchie, the former landscape gardener whose one perfect product, the Brompton folding bicycle, first sketched in his South Kensington flat 40 years ago, has never been bettered or even precisely replicated by any other manufacturer around the world.

Having bought myself a Brompton a decade ago, I called on Ritchie at his Brentford works and found him ‘wearing navy-blue shorts and brown leather lace-up shoes, dragging on a thin roll-up, hunched over a desk strewn with cogs, chains and oily-fingerprinted invoices’: the archetype of the British backroom boffin. He was hoping to produce 14,000 bikes that year, having passed the 10,000 mark in 2002. It was all a bit homespun, but under the managing directorship of Will Butler-Adams since 2008 (with the perfectionist Ritchie in a role that suits him better, as technical director) the privately owned business has gone from strength to strength. It produced 45,000 bikes last year, 80 per cent of them for export, clocking up a £3.4 million profit; and this week it announced a move to a new factory at Greenford big enough to break through 100,000 units in five years’ time.

Brompton is already by some distance the UK’s biggest bike-maker, Raleigh having long ago ceased production at Nottingham. Dyson moved his factory to Malaysia; Jaguar Land Rover has just announced a new assembly plant in Slovakia.